This is commonly listed as an autobiography, and I suppose in most ways it is. It does contain several autobiographical sections in it, but these are interspersed with songs and poems, as well as essays about a variety of topics. This feels to me a lot like The Souls of Black Folks in this way, which has a similar mix of topics, and very much different from Black Reconstruction in America, which is a dedicated history and analysis text.
The autobiographical sections are really interesting, especially since WEB Du Bois’s family comes from French Huguenot ancestry and ties into a later essay in which he discusses a mixed race musician, which discusses how unwanted this person was, conceptually, as a person of mixed race, with the connection to Du Bois’s own history. It goes delves into his education history when he was first looking for education, and then looking for work.
The essays cover a wide variety of topics including an essay about the treatment of Black women in the US, especially in connection to the passage of the 1919 19th Amendment, and the uncomfortable position of that amendment next to the voter suppression in so many places in the US. There’s also a long essay about “The Souls of White Folk” which prefigures similar writing by someone like James Baldwin later on.
