Dark Princess (Banner Books)

For the fantastical storyline, heavy with propagandist overtones, Du Bois depicts 1920s America as a racist nation primed for radical protest and terrorism. Matthew Townes, the protagonist, is a medical student expelled because his race bars him from the required course in obstetrics in a white hospital. Self-exiled in Berlin after his political idealism is corrupted, Townes falls in love with Princess Kautilya, daughter of a maharajah, and joins the international team she heads in which people of color unite against white imperialism. Du Bois recounts their quest for liberation in a whites-only world that overwhelms their passionate love and separates them. Du Bois concludes the novel with the birth of their son--proclaimed as the Maharajah of Bwodpur and "Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds."

The reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune found "amidst much pure romance and preciosity of style there are rich deposits of straight sociology [as well as] interesting and revealing reading [for] the white reader who has yet few ways of looking into the many closed chambers of Negro life or of seeing into the dilemmas of the intellectual Negro mind and heart."

His words of encouragement still speaks volumes to me today. Its been awhile since I read the book, and I know this posting is old. Anyway, I happen to have a book here with me that has a quote from Dubios that I believe is from Dark Princess. "I have known the women of many lands and nations, I have known, seen, and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetly feminine, more unansweringly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and soul than the daughters of my African-American mothers. This then-a little thing-to their memory and inspiration."

How insightful and sensitive to write such encouraging words for all the world to read. Still, I'd like to know more on what Dubois did to combat sexism in his time. I've read only small pieces of Dubios' feelings on how African American females were being slighted, I think. Did he ever speak directly to the sexism within the African-American community?