The story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I--and a new understanding of a great twentieth-century writer.
Deeply researched, crisply written ... Williams makes a compelling case that Close Ranks was the product of both calculation and opportunism ... By rendering this story in such rich archival detail, Williams’s book is a fitting coda to Du Bois’s unfinished history of Black Americans and the First World War.
Williams convincingly renders Du Bois as a tragic figure whose optimism was dashed by the intransigence of racism, adding poignancy to a story about the limits and fragility of American democracy. At once a moving character study and a deeply researched look at a dispiriting era from the country’s past, this is history at its most vivid.
