W.E.B. du Bois, perhaps one of the greatest intellectuals in American history, wrote a classic book about the double consciousness of black Americans. This remains the most timely, most quoted, and in some ways the most misunderstood appraisal of the tenuous psychological position of the black in America ever written. Gerald Early approached 15 black intellectuals and artists and asked them to respond in essay form to the problem of a black split-level consciousness posed by du Bois and what does is mean to be black or African American?. This book is a collection of those original essays.