The Souls of Black Folk Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  I - OF OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS

  II - OF THE DAWN OF FREEDOM

  III - OF MR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND OTHERS

  IV - OF THE MEANING OF PROGRESS

  V - OF THE WINGS OF ATALANTA

  VI - OF THE TRAINING OF BLACK MEN

  VII - OF THE BLACK BELT

  VIII - OF THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  IX - OF THE SONS OF MASTER AND MAN

  X - OF THE FAITH OF THE FATHERS

  XI - OF THE PASSING OF THE FIRST-BORN

  XII - OF ALEXANDER CRUMMELL

  XIII - OF THE COMING OF JOHN

  XIV - THE SORROW SONGS

  THE AFTERTHOUGHT

  NOTES

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  THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He attended public schools there prior to attending Fisk University, where he received his B.A. degree in 1888. Thereafter he received a second B.A. degree, and an M.A. and Ph.D., from Harvard. He studied at the University of Berlin as well. He taught at Wilberforce University and the University of Pennsylvania before going to Atlanta University in 1897, where he taught for many years. A sociologist, historian, poet, and writer of several novels, Du Bois was one of the main founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was a lifelong critic of American society and an advocate of black people against racial injustice. He spent his last years in Ghana, where he died in exile at the age of ninety-five.

  Donald B. Gibson, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of The Fiction of Stephen Crane, The Politics of Literary Expression: Essays on Major Black Writers, The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero, and of numerous articles on American literature, especially black American literature. He is the editor of Five Black Writers: Essays on Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Le Roi Jones and Modem Black Poets.

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  First published in the United States of America by

  A. C. McClurg & Company 1903

  Published with an introduction by Donald Gibson

  in Penguin Books 1989

  This edition published in Penguin Books 1996

  Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963.

  The souls of black folk/W. E. B. Du Bois; introduction by Donald B. Gibson

  p. cm.

  Bibliography: p.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07528-9

  1. Afro-Americans. I. Title. II. Series.

  E185.6.D797 1989

  973’.0496073—dc20 89-31987

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  INTRODUCTION

  THOUGH IT MUST have been clear to Frank Hosmer, principal of the Great Barrington High School about 1882, when he suggested that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced du boys) should take the college preparatory course of study, that he was counseling a superior student, he could not conceivably have known just how superior that student was. Du Bois went on to develop into one of the greatest, most versatile intellectuals ever to emerge from the American cultural soil. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois (as he is most often referred to) devoted his entire life to the cause of freeing black people from the oppression and degradation of racism in all its ugly forms. Du Bois was a firm believer in the efficacy of intellectual endeavor and in the power of logic and reason to persuade people of goodwill to do as they should, to follow the dictates of their values, both political and moral. Hence his arguments are based on the professed values of the society at large. If one accepts rationality as a value, if one adheres to Christianity or to humanism, if one places faith in the Constitution and in the principles of democracy in general, then certain corollaries follow. Du Bois insists that reasonable men may argue reasonably together and that reason will prevail.

  For this reason, The Souls of Black Folk is a very personal document based on the premise that one may know the soul of a race by knowing the soul of one of its members. The “soul,” this argument goes, is a common factor, exclusive of considerations of race, class, or religious affiliation, education or social status. “I am a person,” the logic runs, “and you [Du Bois’s audience] are a person.” As Whitman would have put it, “whatever belongs to me as well belongs to you.” “If I reveal my soul, you will recognize it, for it is the common bond, shared by all who lay claim to membership in the human race.” This assumption underlies the organization of the materials of Du Bois’s book. Its organization is not unlike the organizing principle controlling Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: the various sections coalesce around a general thesis, orientation, and perspective. The relationship among the essays is largely organic, rather than logical. Like Whitman’s long poem, Du Bois’s work does not lend itself entirely to a logical analysis. Du Bois recognizes this when he says in his “Forethought” that he will trace in his book the “vague, uncertain outline” of his subject, the vagueness and uncertainty clearly reflected in his outline of the form of the work.

  First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to [blacks], and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticised 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.

  At the same time, there is a certain logic to the arrangement of the parts of Souls, but its logic is that of metaphor; its chapters fit together, but not in a strictly logical way. This is because of Du Bois’s awareness of the strengths and limitations of logic. Wherea
s he had great faith in logic and in the necessity of claiming logic as a value, he clearly knew that the “rational animal” could be most of the time extraordinarily nonrational. He felt the need, therefore, to seek methods of persuasion beyond the logical. These he found in metaphor. Hence in the title of his book, The Souls of Black Folk, “soul” has at least three distinct meanings: it refers to one’s nonmate rial, immortal part; it refers to one’s core, to one’s most integral, vital part; it refers to the sensitive, feeling component of personality as opposed to the intellectual. Du Bois almost certainly wanted to call forth these meanings and perhaps others, but he especially wanted to invoke the religious denotative and connotative meanings, for few whites of good will who professed to be Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century would publicly deny that black folk had souls. The title is the first thrust of his argument. Du Bois implicitly calls upon the religious ideal which Christianity puts forth: the brotherhood of man beneath the fatherhood of God; brother linked to brother because of the common possession of soul, the essence of being.

  Thus the strategy of The Souls of Black Folk emerged from his previous volumes, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) and The Philadelphia Negro (1899), both scholarly works of extreme importance. The 1896 book, its scholarship and methodology impeccable and beyond the capacities of practically all of Du Bois’s contemporary scholars of history, was an original exploration into its subject and had the honor of being published as the initial volume in the Harvard Historical Studies series. The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological treatise describing in detail life among the black people of Philadelphia, a study that revealed Du Bois to be a most accomplished sociologist who, had his talents been fewer, might easily have pursued a career exclusively in that field. These two outstanding intellectual efforts preceding Souls were designed to appeal to the assumedly rational minds of whites. They were based on the assumption of the efficacy of reasoning. Had reason prevailed, Du Bois would certainly have been invited to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, under whose auspices the study was conducted, certainly after if not before its completion. As it was, racial considerations alone prevented his even being considered a bona fide member of the faculty.

  In Du Bois’s third book, Souls, he does not abandon the notion of the efficacy of reason; rather, he admits that other elements of personality besides rationality are needed in order to deal reasonably with racial issues. For the first time Du Bois expresses the conviction that thought does not exist in a vacuum. Ideas can exist only in a social context. This book, The Souls of Black Folk, signals Du Bois’s growing awareness of the link between thought as abstract and independently existing and thought as grounded in human experience. The character of the essays in this volume, a volume unlike any other that Du Bois assembled, is determined by his attempt to bring together thought and experience: the thought of American intellectuals of his time and his own particular thought; the experience of Americans of his time and his own particular experience—his excellent education at fine institutions of learning, Fisk (1885-88), Harvard (1888-91; 1893-95), and Heidelberg (1891-93), and his experience as a black person in American society at the turn of the century. We also see a conscious attempt on Du Bois’s part to broaden his audience. As brilliant as his first two books were, few beyond specialists in history and sociology would be likely to have read them.

  For this reason we see in Souls the full range of Du Bois’s expressive capacity. We see the objective, reasoned presentation of the historian and sociologist contained in a language as free from subjective connotations as possible (in the essays of historical and sociological character—namely, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” “Of the Meaning of Progress,” “Of the Black Belt,” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”). “Of the Wings of Atalanta” is an admonitory essay based far less on fact than on opinion, but not nearly so purely subjective as “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” a most moving and deeply expressive essay about the death of Du Bois’s firstborn child. In this essay Du Bois has intentionally abandoned the discursive mode of discourse and resorted to an appeal to the emotions of his audience. “Of the Passing of the First-Born” marks a dramatic shift in the tone and mood of the book; after this essay, Du Bois’s approach to his argument throughout the remainder of the book is largely emotional—reasoned but not exclusively rational.

  Though Du Bois did not grow up in the postbellum South, he did not as a child escape entirely the effects of racism. Great Barrington did not have a large black population and the effects of racism were thereby diminished. Yet the distinction between black and white was strongly enough drawn that Du Bois became aware of it, aware that he was somewhat different from most of his primary school classmates, a minority, and thus to some extent stigmatized. This awareness first developed, he tells us in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, when a girl in his one-room school class refused with a peremptory glance his gift of a “visiting-card.” It was at that moment that the “shadow swept across [him]” and he felt “shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

  That veil becomes the central metaphor of the book, and the theme that it suggests, the separation, literally, through segregation, and, psychologically, through the attitudes of whites toward blacks, is evoked time and time again throughout the book. The disaffection that the veil suggests is indicated in the very opening lines of the first chapter as Du Bois recalls countless encounters with whites who see him not as the person he is but as something else, as a “problem.” And because they do not know him, they do not recognize that he is primarily just another human being; they say foolish and awkward things, attempting to convey kindness and understanding but demonstrating instead the immensity of the distance between him and them. Thus he is separated from the general society by the veil, as are all blacks. The Souls of Black Folks is, as Du Bois tells us in his “Forethought,” a lifting of the veil, a revelation of the heretofore unseen.

  It is not always entirely clear just exactly what the veil means or where Du Bois stands in relation to it. First the word seems to have spiritual or religious meaning of some kind, as the use of “souls” in the title suggests. “The Forethought” tells us that the author intends to outline, sketchily and vaguely, “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.” “Spiritual” here refers to the essential being of black people, their innermost character, feelings, and modes of thinking. “Spiritual” also refers to “soul,” and the sketchi ness and vagueness Du Bois refers to are necessary when describing the intangible, as, of course, spirit and soul are. The spirit, soul, of black people exists behind a veil, where it is concealed, separated from others, obscured.

  Du Bois seems not contained by the veil, as other blacks are, but able (through authorial prerogative) to move about it, to step outside it, and even to lift it. To some blacks it is a “prison-house” whose walls are utterly “unscalable,” and they are forever imprisoned. The use of “veil” to create the sense of a region separated from society and even of a prison derives from the meaning of “veil” as a “cloistered life,” as a nun who takes vows may be said to go “behind the veil.” Du Bois, however, far from being held captive, has a sense of self and a self-possession so strong as to allow him to hold the world outside the veil in contempt and to live “above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.” Just exactly what Du Bois means by living above the veil is not entirely clear, yet it doubtless implies escape from the confines of the veil through the capacity to compete successfully with whites, with those who live outside it. The capacity to escape from the veil seems to be related to being outside the veil, and it also allows Du Bois to address the white world as he does in this book. Throughout the first thirteen chapters, he visualizes himself addressing his audience from outside the veil. (“Leaving, then, the world of the white man,” he tells us in “The Forethought,” “I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses.”)
Then in the fourteenth chapter, the one devoted to the spirituals, he steps back within the veil, the realm of the spiritual. Presumably he steps out again when he addresses the reader in “The Afterthought.”

  His movement back and forth, inside and outside the veil, prompts several awarenesses on Du Bois’s part. The character of his voice in “The Forethought” and his acknowledgment that he moves in and out of the white world brings to the fore the awareness that it might not be clear to his audience that he is black. Hence the final words of the introductory note: “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?” Such a line of thought leads him in Chapter I, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” to reveal the origin of his awareness of the existence of the veil. This painful initial experience has nonetheless taught him how he is seen by the world. That early awareness is the source of the thought with which he begins the first chapter: he is not seen by whites to be the unique individual he knows he is; rather, he seems to them to be something else, an abstraction, an idea, and not a man of flesh, blood, and bone. We know by Du Bois’s words that he did not dwell within the veil prior to his knowledge of the fact of its existence, but that he found himself there at a particular point in time. He comes to know that he is perceived by whites around him as different, but he feels he is entirely like them “in heart and life and longing.”

  This description of the difference between black people’s view of themselves and the way whites view them is historically the first outright, extensive explication of the idea of black invisibility, so deeply embedded in black folklore and fiction, so brilliantly and adroitly articulated in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man. The premise of The Souls of Black Folk is that whites do not see blacks—the prime implication of the veil metaphor. The veil is opaque and hence needs to be lifted, as he offers to do himself in “The Forethought.” Du Bois does not, however, distinguish between the metaphor of the veil and the metaphor of invisibility. They are not exactly the same. An entity may be veiled but not invisible, invisible but not veiled. Blacks are both: invisible to those who need them to be invisible, veiled to those who need them veiled.