"Mullen’s illuminating biography is essential for understanding the political, personal, and intellectual challenges Du Bois faced in his lifetime search for a black revolutionary praxis.''
— Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland
“This is Marxist biography at its finest. It is the rare scholarly book that evokes the feeling that our own moment of radical challenge reverberates with the trials of another century, but Mullen proposes an internationalist perspective that re-enchants the story of this activist-intellectual with immediacy.”
— Alan Wald, author of the American Night
“In this new biography, Mullen interprets the seismic political developments of the Twentieth Century through the revolutionary life of W.E.B. Du Bois—focusing not just on his Civil Rights work, but also examining Du Bois’s attitudes towards socialism, the USSR, China’s Communist Revolution, and the relationship between capitalism, poverty and racism.”
— Critical Theory
"W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line serves as a timely introduction to this impressive and somewhat imposing figure, while also reframing Du Bois’s life and work beyond the boundaries of the American context."
— Inside Higher Ed
"While some scholars have tried to domesticate DuBois and confine his intellectual and political life within the boundaries of capitalist hegemony, DuBois was in fact a life-long revolutionary committed to socialism, Pan-Africanism and Black Liberation, a man who late in life – partly as a direct challenge to McCarthyism and the Cold War – joined the Communist Party, USA. Mullen’s W.E.B. DuBois: Revolutionary Across The Color Line corrects the record, highlighting a side of DuBois many would like us to forget. It is a must read for anyone interested in the life and work of this pioneering Black revolutionary."
— People's World
"With Du Bois’s Marxist leanings in mind, Mullen’s strategy is to reinterpret much of what is already known. As biography, the book is very well written, informative, and insightful."
— Choice
"Examines the life of W. E. B. Du Bois and his relationship to key questions of the revolutionary left in the twentieth century, placing Du Bois within a framework of figures of the global left and demonstrating the centrality of radical internationalism to his life and thought."
— Journal of Economic Literature