The Most Underrated Man
Shakir Rashaan
Angelia Vernon Menchan
His signature to me, although it was written over a
hundred years ago, still resonates and has power
in present-day America, as he offered his own
perspective and analysis on race relations. His ideas
for curing the racial gap between those of African
descent and those of European descent combined both
political involvement and achieving higher education
(as evidenced by his being the first man of African
descent to earn a doctorate from Harvard University).
That combination, in his purview, would result in a
cultural renaissance that would be built, while being
a part (albeit a limited part) of mainstream American
life. In short, it would be the catalyst for efforts like the
famed “Black Wall Street” in Greenwood, Oklahoma.
As a teenager growing up in Atlanta at one of the most
historic black high schools in the city, we were exposed
to some of the greatest black influences in history, and
not only during Black History Month. I counted my
easy top five: Frederick Douglass (for obvious reasons,
I attended the school that bears his name), Carter G.
Woodson, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes … and Dr.
W.E.B. DuBois.
Dr. DuBois, in my opinion, is perhaps the greatest
and most underrated and under-read black voice in
the 20th century, and probably more so in the 21st
century, despite Ta-Nehisi Coates saying that his direct
influence of writing Between the World and Me was
Dr. DuBois. The novel that was a direct influence on
my world view was The Soul of Black Folk, although a
case for The Talented Tenth can be made as my Black
History literary recommendation.
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His books, and his famous encounters with Booker T.
Washington that spawned the iconic poem, Booker T.
& W.E.B. by Dudley Randall, are mostly the reasons
for my desire to place the spotlight on Dr. DuBois,
since his ideology mirrors my own, although it is also
dashed with a bit of Mr. Washington’s ideology to
balance things out. At the end of the day, Dr. DuBois
is the reason I wanted to continue my education, no
matter where it led me, and it has led me to some of
the most interesting and exotic places the mind can
conceive, and influenced my desire to pick up the pen.
Salute, Dr. DuBois … as a good friend of mine loves to
say, “I hope the ancestors are pleased with you.”