  The early Du Bois’s defense of a black elite-led politics of expressive modernization has exerted considerable influence on post-Jim Crow political philosophical appraisals of black American politics. Indeed, it is all but impossible to grasp the point of those appraisals without taking account of their engagements, both explicit and implicit, with key elements of Du Bois’s early political thought. For extended discussion of the issues central to the post-Jim Crow inheritance of Du Bois’s early political thought, see, especially, Reed, 1999 and Gooding-Williams, 2009, chapter 6.