ABSTRACT
Exploring Du Bois's relationship to that "deep meaning" embodied in women and color, the authors examine his representation of African-American women and his selective memory of the agency of his contemporaries Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In examining the contradictory aspects of Du Bois's profeminism, the people should consider his political actions on behalf of women's rights, his representations of black women, and the place of African-American women in his nonfictional essays and political autobiographies. With the decline in mob lynchings, her prominence waned while Du Bois's prestige increased in the first part of the twentieth century. In studying Du Bois's treatment of women activists, the people see that nonspecificity and erasure overlap to some degree. The trickster in Du Bois's legacy though suggests that his profeminism, both its advocacy for gender equality and its erasure of radical black women's agency, might be a cornerstone in the construction of the contemporary black intellectual as male elite.
