ABSTRACT
When black youth participated in the sit-ins, bus boycotts, and Freedom Rides which began in the second half of the 1950s, there appeared to be little continuity with the post-Reconstruction black rights movement. It is particularly noticeable that the new generation did not look to W .E.B. DuBois, the major figure in the earlier black rights movement, even though he lived on until 1963 and hardly had a peaceful old age. In his eighties DuBois ran for the United States Senate on the Labor Party ticket, applied to join the Communist Party, renounced his American citizenship, and went to live in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Enough, one would have thought, to have aroused more than occasional notice.
