The Souls of Black Folk

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 (1892-1894) 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 has 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 dreams 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 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 Negro-ness. 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 the 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 brethern of the South, yet who cannot fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethern 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 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 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--so highly praised by some of the friendly contemporary reviews--may now seem a bit obtrusive, but in most the manner is a perfect fir to the matter. And the matter is, always, a "gift 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 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. Not counting the Europeans, this is the twenty-sixth edition. It will not be the last.

Source: W.E. Burghardt Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk: Essay and Sketches. NY: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1961. Introduction by Saunders Redding.

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Other Writings

Books

The Conservation of Races (Washington, D.C.: American Negro Academy, 1897).

Africa: Its Geography, People and Products (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1930).

Africa: Its Place in Modern History (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1930).

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Holt, 1939)

W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, edited by Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970).

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Crisis Writing, editing by Daniel Walden (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1972).

The Emerging Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials From "The Crisis," edited by Henry Lee Moon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972)

The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, edited by Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.

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Jay Saunders Redding (1906-1988) -- scholar, educator, and man of letters -- was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the third of seven children in a upper-class Negro family. His father Lewis Alfred and his mother Mary Ann Holmes were both graduates of Howard University, and political and social activists within the Wilmington black community. One of Redding's teachers at the all-black Howard High School in Wilmington was the widow of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson who was a pioneering black female writer.

Redding attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania for one year (1922) and then continued his studies at Brown University.

At Brown, he received his A.B. in 1928 and his M.A. in 1932. In 1929, Redding married Esther Elizabeth James, an educator; together they had two sons, Conway and Lewis. Saunders Redding has taught at Morehouse (1928-1931), Louisville Municipal College (1934-1936), Southern University in New Orleans (1936-1938), Elizabeth Teachers College, North Carolina (1938-1943), Hampton (1943-1967), Brown (1949-1950; the first black to teach at an Ivy League university); Duke (1964-1965), George Washington University (1968-1970). He retired at Cornell (1970-1981), where he was Ernest I. White Professor Emeritus (the first black to hold an endowed professorship in literary criticism at an Ivy League university).

Redding has been on the editorial board of The American Scholar. His writings were published in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Mercury, Transition, the Nation, Saturday Review, New Republic, Survey Graphic, and other periodicals.

Books

To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939.

No Day of Triumph. New York: Harper, 1942.

Stranger and Alone. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.

On Being Negro in America. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.

An American in India: A Personal Report on the Indian Dilemma and the Nature of Her Conflicts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954.

The Lonesome Road: The Story of the Negro's Part in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958.

The Negro. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 1967.

Other Relevant Books

The New Cavalcade: African American writing from 1760 to the Present / Good Morning, Revolution (1974)

From the Dark Tower (1981) by Arthur P. Davis and To Make a Poet Black (1988) by J. Saunders Redding with an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS

BCP Digital Printing

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update 22 April 2009