Volume 49, Issue 3

BARRY MOSER'S striking new image ofW. E. B. Du Bois on the cover of this issue serves as a vivid reminder of one of this magazine's guiding spirits. It is sometimes difficult to remember, given Du Bois' international influence and his general residence on planet Earth, that he was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and went on to earn the first PhD conferred by Harvard University on an African American. Du Bois was still alive when the Massachusetts Review was founded, and for the Spring issue of 1960 he contributed an article, "A Negro Student at Harvard at the End of the Nineteenth Century." The library at the University of Massachusetts is named for him, as is the Department of Afro-American Studies.

MR has published at least nine articles concerned primarily with Du Bois and his work, notably John Hope Franklin's "personal memoir" and Ernest Allen Jr.'s meditation on double consciousness. As the magazine became more involved with the Civil Rights movement, attracting contributors like the Reverend Martin Luther King in 1962, the spirit of Du Bois took even deeper root. As a thinker he is notable for the flexibility of his approaches. If one method reached a dead end, he'd find another way to get closer to the heart of the matter.

And here we are, still wrestling with questions of race and democracy. Du Bois was born only three years after Emancipation, but as we ponder Barry Moser's rendition of that face so effervescent with curiosity, can we find distant fore knowledge of a black presidential nominee, who may even have a chance of winning?

David Lenson
for the editors

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