The Souls of Black Folk

“[F]or the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”

Du Bois argues that confronting racism and segregation is the most urgent problem for modern society. Most white readers would have found this pronouncement to be startling given their focus on modernizing the country, economic challenges, and industrialization.

“Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses.”

Du Bois introduces the metaphor of the veil to represent the separation in the worldviews of blacks and whites. Du Bois establishes credibility and authority, representing himself as a person capable of lifting the veil to allow whites to learn more about African Americans.

“How does it feel to be a problem?”

Du Bois identifies how challenging it is for African Americans that their identities are almost always represented as ones that cause a problem for American society. Such a question, even when well-intentioned or merely implied, underscores that African Americans are not seen as an intrinsic part of the nation.

“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.”

Du Bois introduces the concept of double-consciousness to describe the paradox of being an African-American—a second-class citizen in a land that is supposed to grant freedom to all. While African Americans are legally free, fighting segregation and racism consume so much of their energies that they are not psychologically free. Du Bois’s representation of double-consciousness as a heroic but tragic struggle was an important construction of contemporary African-American identity, which tended to represent African Americans as shallow, ignorant, and complacent.

“In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.”

Du Bois’s argues that the poor and lowly status of African Americans is the result of the country having failed to deliver on all that it promised via the Freedmen’s Bureau. This quote summarizes the widespread, negative impacts of this failure.

“And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded.”

Du Bois criticizes the leadership and vision of Booker T. Washington for being narrow. Du Bois’s objection is based on his sense that Washington asks too little of whites and expects too little of African Americans. Washington’s racial leadership was still unquestioned by many, so such an attack would have come as a shock to readers.

“Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.”

Du Bois clearly articulates his major objection to Washington’s leadership: Washington uncritically embraces materialism, which Du Bois sees as a threat to Western and American culture as it modernizes.

“Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers, —barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.”

Du Bois describes the impact of double-consciousness on the people born after the end of slavery. These young people have enough education to desire to advance themselves, but racism and lack of economic opportunity prevent them from fulfilling their dreams.

“Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread.”

Du Bois uses Atlanta as a symbol of the growing materialism of people in the South (including African Americans) and of the country as a whole. He believes this emphasis on material wealth is a threat to American and Western values.

“Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis.”

Du Bois describes Atlanta University, a black university where African Americans are taught in the liberal arts traditions. Atlanta University is Du Bois’s idealized vision of a liberal arts education that can serve as a foundation for the “Talented Tenth.”

“Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.”

Du Bois’s argument here is that there is grave danger in not incorporating African Americans into the Southern and American culture and society. He argues that education is ideally suited for doing this work.

“The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.”

Du Bois recognizes that education is designed to prepare people for work, but he believes it is also meant to prepare them to think critically about their lives and to build character. This position contrasts with that of Washington, who thought education should be tied to vocation and that issues related to citizenship and character should be set aside for a later time.

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?”

Du Bois’s point is that education in the entire Western tradition is the great equalizer for African Americans. White people’s refusal to accept African Americans as equals in this realm undercuts their supposed commitment to liberal values.

“Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant remains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.”

Du Bois highlights how slavery continues to have an impact on the American economy. A focus on cotton and a lack of black capital leave economic control in the hands of whites. 

“How curious a land is this, —how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia.”

This is a description of the Black Belt, so named because of its fertile soil, which became the heart of the cotton industry. Du Bois’s description of the Black Belt challenges the representation of African Americans and the South unworthy of study and devoid of life.

“So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying. We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.”

Du Bois argues that African-American laborers are worthy of careful study because they are the engine that drives an important part of the world economy. He also presents himself as a person who can give an accurate account of African-American life. 

“The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of their condition. If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is the one-room cabin, —now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid the green of the cotton-fields.”

Du Bois frequently takes a creative approach to examining African-American life. In this quote, he makes a typical sociologist’s move by examining the architecture of the Black Belt to learn something about the social status of its people.

“We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life,—all this, even as you and I.”

Du Bois’s language in this passage encourages the reader to identify with the rural black laborer. This passage is thus one of his many efforts to peel back the separation of the racial veil between blacks and whites.

“And to all this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day.”

Du Bois uses the objective voice of a social scientist, admitting that there are some negative trends in African-American culture. However, he also takes pains to contextualize these trends by being attentive to the impact of history and economics.

“Sprung from the African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.”

Du Bois identifies African-American music, particularly the spiritual, as an important repository of the inner lives African Americans during slavery. He makes this argument again in “Of the Sorrow Songs.”

“Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? —for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.”

Du Bois uses his central metaphors for race, the veil and the color-line, to talk about the impact of race and racism on even the most intimate of relationships. It is also notable that Du Bois chooses to use autobiographical narrative about the death of his child to illuminate the reality of race for his readers.

“‘John,’ she said, ‘does it make every one—unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?’ He paused and smiled. ‘I am afraid it does,’ he said. ‘And, John, are you glad you studied?’ ‘Yes,’ came the answer, slowly but positively.”

In this scene, John Jones and his sister Jennie talk after John has offended his church by calling for African Americans to engage with a world beyond religion and the South. Du Bois uses the story of John’s unsuccessful efforts to re-integrate with his community after gaining an education to show the true cost of failing to open opportunities to all African Americans, especially the most talented.

“And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”

Du Bois claim that African-American folk songs are the only original American music places African-American culture at the center of the nation’s story. By making such a claim, Du Bois intervenes to change the representation of African-American culture to a more positive one.

“What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”

Du Bois engages in thematic analysis of songs to debunk the myth of the happy slave and to document that African Americans engaged in thoughtful reflection on their condition.