  From Du Bois, then, a philosophy of the soul, if you will, motivated by the compelling needs of a racialized people subjected to ontological as well as social, political, economic, and cultural degradation. In particular, during the turbulent decades of the orchestrated failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction, when real possibilities for racial and economic democracy were being killed at birth by the proponents and guardians of capitalism and White Racial Supremacy, Du Bois initially worked out his affirmative cultural nationalist position on the raciality of the Negro, and of other races, in “The Conservation of Races” (1897; 1992). This was an effort at conceptionalization to which Du Bois would return and rework several times, even near the end of his extraordinarily long and productive life, as in “Whither Now and Why” (1960; 1973). Throughout his life Du Bois remained convinced that people of African descent should articulate and appropriate a racial identity based on shared history and culture and continue to invest in their historical legacies and cultural creativity while holding open to all, “on the principle of universal brotherhood,” the organizations, institutions, and cultural riches in and through which the life-worlds of Negro peoples are forged, sustained, and shared.