The Souls of Black Folk

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

By W. E. B. DU BOIS

Introduction by Saunders Redding

The Souls of Black Folk

By W. E. B. Du Bois

Introduction by Saunders Redding

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6129-4

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5231-5

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Cover Image: Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois by J. E. Purdy, c. 1909. Colorized by Marina Amaral. Colorization copyright Digireads.com Publishing 2016.

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CONTENTS

The Forethought

Introduction

Chapter I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Chapter II. Of the Dawn of Freedom

Chapter III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

Chapter IV. Of the Meaning of Progress

Chapter V. Of the Wings of Atalanta

Chapter VI. Of the Training of Black Men

Chapter VII. Of the Black Belt

Chapter VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

Chapter IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man

Chapter X. Of the Faith of the Fathers

Chapter XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born

Chapter XII. Of Alexander Crummell

Chapter XIII. Of the Coming of John

Chapter XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs

The Afterthought

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

The Forethought

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.

I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a chapter of song.

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World’s Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

W. E. B. DU BOIS

ATLANTA, GA., FEB. 1, 1903.

Introduction

The publication of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 was an event of major importance. It not only represented a profound change in its scholar-author’s view of what was then called the Negro Problem, but heralded a new approach to social reform on the part of the American Negro people—an approach of patriotic, non-violent activism which achieved its first success less than a decade ago. The boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, had many roots—the example of Gandhi’s movement of passive resistance against the British in India, the precedent-making 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision which showed that the American people as a whole were ready for racial equality, the leadership of a young Negro minister dedicated to peaceful reform—but none more important than this little book of essays published more than a half-century ago.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in Nashville in 1888. Moving on to Harvard, he spent four years of graduate study in psychology, philosophy and history under some of the best minds of the age—William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Albert Bushnell Hart—and there formulated the scholarly ambition of pursuing knowledge only. Two fruitful years followed at the University of Berlin (1892-94) where, encouraged by the illustrious economic historian Gustav Schmoller, Du Bois came to believe that the solution to the Negro problem was a matter of systematic investigation—that ignorance alone was the cause of race prejudice and that scientific truth could dispel it.

Following this line of thought, Du Bois completed his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, which was hailed as the first scientific historical work written by a Negro and, because of its quality of scholarship, achieved publication as the first volume of the new Harvard Historical Studies (1896).

With characteristic versatility, Du Bois then turned from history to the study of sociology, then in its infancy, and wrote The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, published in 1899 by the University of Pennsylvania. In the meantime he had accepted an invitation to teach sociology at Atlanta University, where he set up a program of studies of the American Negro which was to be primarily scientific—a careful search for Truth conducted as thoroughly, broadly, and honestly as the material resources and mental equipment at command will allow. Nevertheless (as hinted in his use of the word primarily) he was already beginning to suspect that such detached inquiry was not enough—and by 1903, the date of The Souls of Black Folk, he was asserting that truth alone did not encourage [or] help social reform.

To understand this revolution in Du Bois’ thinking, one must understand what had happened to the hopes of the American Negro. The Emancipation and the period of the Reconstruction following the Civil War—the period of Du Bois’ childhood—had brought dreams of equality and, for a time, some actual power to the Negro. But then the reaction had set in, and by the turn of the century the dreams had been shattered, and what Du Bois saw around him was the steady—and apparently accelerating—deterioration of the position of the Negro in American life. An almost complete disenfranchisement of the Negro had been effected in state constitutional conventions, the delegates to which were elected, as Virginia’s Carter Glass declared, to discriminate ... with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate. Anti-Negro demagogues—Tillman of South Carolina, Watson of Georgia, Vardaman of Mississippi—had become rampant, and lynchings averaged one in every three and a half days. Negro schools, where they existed at all, were so poor that attendance made little difference in a Negro’s education; Negro poverty and crime were increasing everywhere. And the Negro leaders? Booker T. Washington was the Negro leader; and he was measuring the statistical indices of these sobering facts with an imperturbability that seemed at times to amount to indifference. This was the situation that Du Bois saw, and—because, finally, Du Bois the scholar was only a graft on Du Bois the Negro—could not tolerate. In the face of the circumstances, he could not [remain] a calm, cool, and detached scientist.

The Souls of Black Folk is more history-making than historical. It is, among other things, a statement of personal attitudes and principles that have determined the public career of a great man for more than half a century, a career that has profoundly influenced the thoughts and actions of thousands of people, white as well as black, abroad as well as at home.

But The Souls of Black Folk is history-making in another sense too. Peter Abrahams, the South African colored writer, was not alone when he said, upon first reading this book in 1948, that until then he had had no words with which to voice his Negroness. It had, he wrote, the impact of a revelation ... a key to the understanding of my world. Much earlier, the American Negro leader James Weldon Johnson stated that it had "a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin." Thus The Souls of Black Folk may be seen as fixing that moment in history when the American Negro began to reject the idea of the world’s belonging to white people only, and to think of himself, in concert, as a potential force in the organization of society. With its publication, Negroes of training and intelligence, who had hitherto pretended to regard the race problem as of strictly personal concern and who sought individual salvation in a creed of detachment and silence, found a bond in their common grievances and a language through which to express them.

In the most famous of the essays, Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, Du Bois writes, ... the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs ... So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men ... Eighteen months after these words were in print, they were confirmed by the formation of the famous Niagara Movement—the forerunner of the N.A.A.C.P.

Du Bois’ words were a counterpoise to Washington’s feathery phrases of compromise, and, not surprisingly, were greeted with much Southern criticism. Georgia’s Atlanta Constitution ran a three-column review which concluded that The Souls of Black Folk is the thought of a negro of northern education who has lived among his brethren of the South, yet who cannot fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethren know by instinct—and which the southern-bred white knows by a similar instinct—certain things which are by both accepted as facts. The Nashville Banner agreed, and added a warning: This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only excite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind.

But the things about which Du Bois wrote did exist—both in attitudes and in historical fact. Some of the essays, notably IV through IX, are based on the sociological studies Du Bois developed at Atlanta University. They are at once vigorous statements of the Negro’s case against the prevailing white attitudes that relegated him to non-citizen status, and commendably objective analyses of that status, with postulates so sound that they are still assumed by scholars and social commentators concerned with the South. Perhaps the most scientific of the essays is Of the Dawn of Freedom which, despite its oracular and somewhat misleading beginning (The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line ...), is primarily a historical account of the Freedman’s Bureau. Other essays are personal recollections and reflections, powerfully evocative of a South and a Southern way of life that has not yet entirely passed. These contain some of Du Bois’ best writing, and prove his extraordinary skill at adapting academic learning to the use of figurative prose. They remind us once again that neither bitter anger nor desperate rebelliousness—both charged against him—were the ruling passions of Du Bois’ young life. One essay, Of Alexander Crummell, is a eulogy of the character and services of one of Du Bois’ early heroes. It is a laud, veritably a song of praise. Another, Of the Coming of John, is a short story, almost a parable in tone and in intent. In a few, the literary charm—so highly praised by some of the friendly contemporary reviews—may now seem a bit obtrusive, but in most the manner is a perfect fit to the matter. And the matter is, always, a gift of Spirit from the Negro people:—Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.

It is impossible to say finally what makes a literary classic, for no two are alike. No two are alike for the simplest and best of reasons: each is the expression of an individual, of a particular genius. Classics have only this in common—they minister to universal emotional needs; they supply something vital to the universal intellect. The Souls of Black Folk does this by expressing the soul of one people in a time of great stress, and showing its kinship with the timeless soul of all mankind. The Souls of Black Folk will go on doing this.

SAUNDERS REDDING

Hampton Institute

Chapter I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,

All night long crying with a mournful cry,

As I lie and listen, and cannot understand

The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,

O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?

All night long the water is crying to me.

Unresting water, there shall never be rest

Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,

And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;

And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,

All life long crying without avail,

As the water all night long is crying to me.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of