This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

Citizens are civic friends when they agree about the regime, their political system. In liberal democracies there is agreement about the regime, or at least about its presuppositions: freedom and equality. This insight is simple but profound because regimes are self-perpetuating: they mold citizens into a recognizable type, such as the type that loves freedom and equality. Citizens tend to like this type of person—the type they themselves belong to. A “thin” agreement is the core of Aristotle’s teaching on civic friendship. For his immediate audience, he wanted more. Although his best-practicable regime leaves out many features of his best regime, civic friendship is a critical feature. Civic friendship has been transformed by federalism, by modern communications, more recently by the internet and social media. But “the Greek polis was small enough for everyone to be friends” is a modern mistake forgetting that civic friendship is an analogy. We cannot have many friends, Aristotle says, “except in the civic sense.”