Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Du Bois maintained that the book was written to develop an understanding of the complications of the color-line with emphasis on its political implications.

If the white workingmen of East St. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take the bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have been translated into murder.

Manifestly because in the great organizing of men for work a few of the participants come out with more wealth than they can possibly use, while a vast number emerge with less than can decently support life.

[3] The stories within Darkwater also revolve around discontent with the way that democracy was viewed and handled among people of different ethnic, racial, and social groups.

In this text Du Bois compiles previously written works from The Atlantic, The Independent, The Crisis, and the Journal of Race Development.

I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.

Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil was well received by audiences after it was first published, helping to open the eyes of readers to the problems of racial discrimination in America.

[7] In his review of Darkwater in the popular magazine The Survey, Robert Foerster writes: "Actually it is a book so skillfully put together, so passionately felt, so lyrically expressed, that it will be read widely.