The Fight for Equality and the American Century re-creates the second portion of Du Bois' charged and brilliant career from the return of World War I African-American veterans to the riots and lynchings of the "Red Summer" of 1919 to his self-imposed exile in Ghana forty-four years later. Decade by dramatic decade, Du Bois becomes more radical in his determination not only to dismantle Jim Crow but to transform the black civil rights movement from a struggle for racial equality into global struggle for economic inequality.

Once again, he confronts a powerful ideological adversary, Marcus Garvey, a charismatic nemesis whose fabulous success in enrolling black people into a back-to-Africa movement comes perilously close during the 1920s to displacing Du Bois's own grandiose schemes of Pan-African advancement. The biography chronicles in vivid blow-by-blow, the titanic confrontation of Du Bois and Garvey, a struggle that rages as Du Bois, in collaboration with others, inaugurates the Harlem Renaissance. A civil rights enterprise masquerading as an arts and letters movement, the remorselessly principled Du Bois soon renounces this movement as being an evasion of the political and economic exigencies of the masses of black people.

While others were stunned and thought only of surviving the crisis, the Great Depression acts as a tonic for Du Bois. The premier architect of civil rights sheds the "talented-tenth" elitism of which he was the leading exponent, breaks with the NAACP as an outpaced bureaucracy no longer adequate to the times, produces in short order a masterwork of history, Black Reconstruction in America, and pursues a politically risky course into socialism and anti-imperialism that takes him to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan as the major geopolitics of the American Century are taking shape. In defiance of the laws of aging in obedience to which most men and women become less radical and increasingly fixed in their ideas and passions, Du Bois' writings and actions become ever bolder and more creative. His private life mirrors his public, filled with remarkable women who inspire him and many of whom wait patiently in hopes of becoming the second Mrs. Du Bois.

Increasingly committed to world socialism in his search for racial solutions after his postwar return to the NAACP, Du Bois embraces the Progressive Party politics of Henry Wallace and once again departs the NAACP in a firestorm of controversy in 1948. Federal indictment as a foreign agent and humiliation follow, but fail to silence the great contrarian who remarked that had he died at fifty, he would have been acclaimed. "At seventy five, my death was practically requested." Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, in August 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington just as the generation that would change America came onto the stage inspired by his legacy.