The Souls of Black Folk

By W. E. B. Du Bois, Vann R. Newkirk II and Steve Prince

Restless Classics presents The Souls of Black Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal work of sociology, with searing insights into our complex, corrosive relationship with race and the African-American consciousness. Reconsidered for the era of Obama, Trump, and Black Lives Matter, the new edition includes an incisive introduction from rising cultural critic Vann R. Newkirk II and stunning illustrations by the artist Steve Prince. 

Published in 1903, exactly forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk fell into the hands of an American nation that had still not yet found “peace from its sins.” With such deep disappointment among African-Americans still awaiting full emancipation, Du Bois believed that the moderate and conciliatory efforts of civil-rights leader Booker T. Washington could only go so far. Taking to the page, Du Bois produced a resounding declaration on the rights of the American man and laid out an agenda that was at the time radical but has since proven prophetic. In fourteen chapters that move fluidly between historical and sociological essays, song and poetry, personal recollection and fiction, The Souls of Black Folk frames “the color line” as the central problem of the twentieth century and tries to answer the question, “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” Striking in his psychological precision as well as his political foresight, Du Bois advanced ithe influential ideas of “double-consciousness”—an inner conflict created by the seemingly irreconcilable “black” and “American” identities—and “the veil,” through which African-Americans must see a spectrum of economic, social, and political opportunities entirely differently from their white counterparts’.

Now, over fifty years after Du Bois’s death and the Civil Rights Act, we need this seminal work more urgently than ever. Long overdue for reconsideration, it is the latest installment of Restless Classics, featuring illustrations by master printmaker Steve Prince and a new introduction by Atlantic staff writer Vann R. Newkirk II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Feb 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781632060983

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and socialist. Born in Massachusetts, he was raised in Great Barrington, an integrated community. He studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard, where he became the first African American scholar to earn a doctorate. He worked as a professor at Atlanta University, a historically black institution, and was one of the leaders of the Niagara Movement, which advocated for equal rights and opposed Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise. In 1909, he cofounded the NAACP and served for years as the editor of its official magazine The Crisis. In addition to his activism against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination and segregation, Du Bois authored such influential works as The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). A lifelong opponent of racism and a committed pacifist, Du Bois advocated for socialism as a means of replacing racial capitalism in America and around the world. In the 1920s, he used his role at The Crisis to support the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and sought to emphasize the role of African Americans in shaping American society in his book The Gift of Black Folk (1924).

Book preview

The Souls of Black Folk

W. E. B. Du Bois

Introduction by Vann R. Newkirk II

Illustrations by Steve Prince

Restless Classics

RESTLESS BOOKS

Brooklyn, New York

Praise for W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk

Dr. Du Bois was not only an intellectual giant exploring the frontiers of knowledge, he was in the first place a teacher. He would have wanted his life to teach us something about our tasks of emancipation. One idea he insistently taught was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave. . . Dr. Du Bois recognized that the keystone in the arch of oppression was the myth of inferiority and he dedicated his brilliant talents to demolish it. —Martin Luther King Jr.

Du Bois . . . wrote knowing full well that what he said was neither palatable nor negotiable, that a large portion of the country would not be swayed, and that the truth, in and of itself, must be enough. It is often said that this space lacks for hope. Here is your bone for the day: In the academy, Du Bois was victorious. He did not live to see that victory, but it is his view on the centrality of white supremacy that now carries the day. —Ta-Nehisi Coates

What Dr. Du Bois showed is that he had enormous courage. I would encourage young men and women, black and white and Asian and Spanish speaking and all, all to look at Dr. Du Bois and realize that courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can’t be consistently fair or kind or generous or forgiving any of those without courage. —Maya Angelou

Du Bois’s most important gift to the black literary tradition is, without question, the concept of the duality of the African American, expressed metaphorically in his elated metaphors of ‘double-consciousness’ and the ‘veil.’ —Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"The impact of The Souls of Black Folk on black American writing, and on writing about black America, is all the clearer. The descent of the imaginative treatments of two-ness, invisibility, and the magic behind the veil, from Ellison to Baldwin to Morrison, has by now become a stock theme in accounts of modern American literature. But the book’s radicalism, its astonishing precocity, hardly ends there. It would take more than fifty years for mainstream American historical writing to catch up with Du Bois’ insight about the resilience and spiritual depth of the slaves’ culture, and about the benefits of Reconstruction and the ex-slaves’ role in achieving those benefits . . . And historians have only begun to comprehend and amplify Du Bois’ claim that American culture has been marked, indeed defined, by black people’s presence." —Sean Wilentz

Du Bois is the brook of fire through which we all must pass in order to gain access to the intellectual and political weaponry needed to sustain the radical democratic tradition in our time. —Cornel West

I never emulated white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Du Bois and Mandela. —Barack Obama

Introduction

vann r. newkirk ii

—

the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. So William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—pronounced as he did in a manner that rhymes with new toys—outlines the concern of his 1903 collection of essays.

Though Du Bois was a man of prodigious skill, who in the course of his life mastered disciplines as diverse as fiction and sociology, he never claimed a talent for prophecy. Still, the color line of which he wrote would go on to dominate not only the policies, economics, movements, and social developments of the twentieth century, but so far this little sliver of the twenty-first as well. From Barack Obama’s presidency to the rise of Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump’s election amid a furor over voting rights, white nationalism, and racism, the color line is still the country’s core subject, over a century after the first edition of The Souls of Black Folk was published. He made the prescient decision to title the introduction, in which he so succinctly describes the American animus, The Forethought.

The Souls of Black Folk has been perhaps the most influential work about race in America in the 113 years since its release, and I hardly go a day without thinking about it. My first time reading it was in a freshman literature class at Morehouse College, and I recall furious highlighting, dog-earing, and margin-scribbling as I pored over words that for the first time finally came close to explaining what I felt about my blackness. Du Bois’s description of a veil separating my world from the world of mainstream America was maybe the first prompt for me to sit down and examine the microaggressions and frustrations that I did not have the language to understand. The ever-present tension in my life was the result of a double consciousness: of course! As a double major in biology and philosophy—one for my parents’ and community’s sense of my path toward becoming a doctor, and the other for my own personal edification—I felt the echoes of Du Bois’s famous intellectual duel with Booker T. Washington over the course of black America. The necessity of my enrollment at my alma mater, a historically black college, became crystallized in Du Bois’s passionate defense of such institutions. Through his combination of reporting, commentary, cultural analysis, and history, I realized that my own intellectual development needed not be limited by genre or discipline. And thus I count The Souls of Black Folk as the work that has most influenced my career, which has taken me to the very same Atlantic in which Du Bois first published parts of that work. I still have that freshman-year copy, dog-eared, stained, and crumbling, with the margins so full of notes and the pages so saturated with highlighter that the annotations cease to have meaning. But written all over that book in smudges, black and blue and pink, green, and yellow, is one experience that I cannot forget: epiphany.

That epiphany unfolds today. As America faces the demons of brutality and extrajudicial killing, as it is possessed by the ghosts of white supremacy and ethnonationalism, as voting rights for black people continue to be assailed by the state, and as the equality and desegregation gains of the Civil Rights Movement suddenly seem fragile and rather reversible, it is obvious that while Du Bois now rests, his most-famous work does not.

—

The first note about The Souls of Black Folk is its unusual structure. Collections of topical essays are not uncommon arrangements for books—and Du Bois’s work kicked off a strong tradition in the same vein of race writing—but The Souls of Black Folk shifts through genre, praxis, and voice even as its focus on the problem of the color line remains intense and unmoving. The fourteen chapters are standalone works, many published beforehand, but still connected at the spine by Du Bois’s themes. With carefully collected epigraphs and musical scores that precede each section, these chapters are transfigured into a panorama, a look at the same fundamental questions through multiple lenses.

The first lens is perhaps the most popular. Of Our Spiritual Strivings is one of the most-often-quoted pieces of the black canon, and it is one of the first thorough attempts at understanding blackness through a psychological and philosophical lens. Du Bois takes a few different paths to answering the question at the heart of this essay: what does it mean to be black? First, Du Bois bounces back a rhetorical question: How does it feel to be a problem? he asks. Then, he expands on that question with a touch of mysticism in describing the Negro race as a sort of seventh son, born with a veil. That veil, as Du Bois describes it, is an ever-present awareness of one’s own otherness. In the keystone paragraph of the entire volume, Du Bois elucidates a double consciousness by which black people seeking to get by in a white world have to dissociate their inner black selves from a performative version meant for white consumption. One ever feels his twoness— Du Bois writes, 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. Deeper into the chapter, the author writes what reveals itself as an outline for the rest of the book.

Of the Dawn of Freedom, an essay on the history of the post–Civil War Freedmen’s Bureau, finds Du Bois as an activist-historian, his firsthand observation meshing with his Northern detachment. As an introductory text to the era, it is a necessary work. In finding the effort of Reconstruction at fault, Du Bois subverts the common view among many historians of the era that Reconstruction was destined to fail because of deficiencies among black people and of the cause itself. He describes how the enduring system of racism continued to control nearly everything even half a century after slavery, an idea he develops in subsequent essays. Throughout the rest of The Souls of Black Folk, the political and social forces that contributed to the failure of Reconstruction are in essence an invisible antagonist. Especially today, in the midst of a racial backlash that appears similar in character to the Redemption that followed Reconstruction, the lessons of the failure of the era resound.

Du Bois’s famous—or infamous—critique of fellow black political and race-theory leader Booker T. Washington is the third essay in sequence. The dispute between the two men, caricatured as a war between a liberal-arts-minded radical upstart with goals of forcing America to confront racism with reparations, and an appeasement-minded apologist with the aim of cajoling black people into practical submission, is often remembered as acrimonious, and not incorrectly. However, one notes that the start of this rivalry, as officially announced in The Souls of Black Folk, reads more like a student respectfully reproaching an old teacher. Du Bois knew Washington well, and understood the experiential and regional differences that necessarily made him de-emphasize the pursuit of civil rights and integration for black people. This essay, together with the next three sections, forms a semicoherent suite of work in a multifaceted format: criticism of Washingtonian ideals of the black South supplemented with gripping personal experience and reporting. Du Bois rejects Washington’s industrialist vision of segregated prosperity as a way of shift[ing] the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders.

That critique continues, by way of example, in the fourth essay, Of the Meaning of Progress, which has always been one of my favorite pieces of this book. Du Bois tells the story of his life as a young teacher in a small town, where he became attached to a black community that still struggled to find its way through destitution and marginalization in a changing world. His students are only tenuously connected to school, and education and contemplation are often cast aside for even the brightest, like the tragic Josie, one of Du Bois’s pupils. As the town becomes increasingly afflicted by criminality, vicious inequality, and industrial exploitation, Du Bois—with a touch of ivory-tower condescension—highlights the mean cycles of their lives. The moving account is probably meant as a dig toward Washington and the kinds of lives Du Bois believes are the end results of his philosophy. Without civil-rights protections, liberal education, and an inward focus on liberation, these Washingtonian yeomen are doomed despite their Herculean work, so goes Du Bois’s implicit argument.

The thread of a coherent anti-Washingtonian view continues in Of the Wings of Atalanta, in which Du Bois levies criticism against the materialism of the New South and its reflection in black culture. He lauds the rise of historically black liberal-arts colleges as a way to move the race beyond obsession with materialist concerns and toward the pursuit of humanity. The following, Of the Training of Black Men, continues in a more pedagogical critique of Washington and completes the arc of Du Bois’s push for a liberal-arts secondary- and higher-education system as a necessary remedy for the ills of racism. No secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat, Du Bois says, both purposefully undermining the security for whites that Washington’s vision promoted, and foreshadowing his own midlife turn to Marxism. In that essay can also be seen the seeds of the Talented Tenth idea of an elite Negro intelligentsia that would become so associated with Du Bois throughout his lifetime.

The next tetrad in The Souls of Black Folk is often the most-overlooked segment of the book, sandwiched as it is between preceding sections that contain some of Du Bois’s most quoted and known ideas and a set of beautiful experimental essays in closing. But taken as a whole, the sociological work presented in Of the Black Belt, Of the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Of the Sons of Master and Man, and Of the Faith of the Fathers takes stock of Du Bois’s present and provides an early, sober view of nascent free black culture in the South. Du Bois explores the lands where brutal chattel slavery drove profits under King Cotton, and where a new system akin to it arose almost instantly out of the ashes of Reconstruction. In the first two works of this tetrad, Du Bois travels the breadth of the South and lands in Dougherty County, Georgia, where he surveys the debt-driven tenant-farming and sharecropping system that maintained racial hierarchies. In this analysis, we see how the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, recounted earlier, finally manifests as a near-permanent regime of economic inequality.

In Of the Sons of Master and Man, Du Bois attempts a feat that feels eerily contemporary: tracing the relationships between segregation and inequality, crime and criminalization, and exposing the broad disenfranchising effort at the heart of Jim Crow. It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, he observes, noting a trend toward segregation and housing discrimination that continues to influence policy and spark riots today. In perhaps the most-chilling connection to the current political and racial moment, Du Bois details the foundation of policing as one not of law and order, but of control of black bodies. The police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply criminals, Du Bois writes. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency . . . and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. Thus our luminary author becomes one of the earliest commentators to note the racist origins of the most basic pieces of our criminal-justice system and observe the rise of mass incarceration even as it rose. His account of the institution of the black church and the role of spirituality and liberation theology in Of the Faith of the Fathers seems a natural counterpoint to the despair that comes from experience with such oppression.

The last four essays in The Souls of Black Folk are, in my reckoning, the most beautiful writing that Du Bois produced, and constitute the emotional heart of the book. Here, the veneer of Du Bois as a measured, journalistic observer is peeled back to reveal the man underneath, and the resulting work is a set of deeply personal and exploratory chapters. Of the Passing of the First-Born is a tragic and sorrowful ode to a lost infant son, a eulogy that Du Bois transforms into a fiery howl against the world. Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bound, but free, he writes about his son’s escape from the racism of the world and the veil that he confronted as a writer every day. No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death. The psychic cost for Du Bois of standing watch against the evils of racism and of his vigilance against lynching is suddenly laid bare: what lies underneath in this mourning piece is the man’s raw, damaged soul. Just as for black writers today who catalogue death after death of black people at the hands of police, Du Bois’s work is both catharsis and torture.

Of Alexander Crummell is a brief biography that intersects with the previous essay as a sort of character study in the kind of desolation that comes with race work. The eponymous man is a mentor and ideological predecessor to Du Bois, and Du Bois’s own story is reflected in much of Crummell’s life. A northern black man born free in New York in 1819, Crummell became a trailblazer in both the theological and the educational worlds, but was met at every turn with prejudice and obstruction. His dream of Pan-Africanism and of using religion to organize black resistance never quite materialized, but Du Bois stresses how he never succumbed to the despair and depression that should so naturally follow from being both a witness to and a crusader against racism. In the closing, Du Bois writes about his motive to tell Crummell’s story: as a fight against erasure and the prioritization of white history at the expense of the richness of black history.

The penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk is a short story, a form that seems like a departure for both the book and for Du Bois’s analytical demeanor, but actually works seamlessly within both. The author took an interest in fiction—specifically speculative fiction and science fiction—and dabbled in using short stories as a vehicle to probe the corners of his developing philosophies and sociological conclusions. Of the Coming of John is such a work, and tackles the latent and developing veil between the two titular Johns, one black and one white. Both characters seek education, though black John’s life is fraught with missteps and setbacks, and he embodies the work twice as hard maxim still told to black children. The two still establish similar orbits, but eventually the cracks in black John’s life widen into fissures. A school he establishes is shuttered after he attempts to teach students about race and racism. White John, however, lives a life of relative ease, idleness, and privilege, and eventually sexually assaults black John’s sister. The tragedy of black John’s life finally unravels when he kills white John and faces a lynch mob. The dance of privilege, racial disparities, sexual assault, and lynching that black John and black John’s family face is no doubt a stand-in for what Du Bois saw as the struggle for all black Americans.

Finally, Of the Sorrow Songs closes the work by coalescing the running references to Negro spirituals in the introductions of several previous chapters. On the surface, this chapter is a defense of the spiritual as an essential distillation of the Negro condition, and worthy on its own as both a complex high art and a quintessentially American art. But this essay is also about the creators of that art: taking on fully the role of activist, Du Bois launches an angry and forceful defense of black people and black culture and offers a full-throated call for the recognition of black personhood. After a series of pieces that rely mostly on steady, sober journalism, theorizing, and academic writing, Of the Sorrow Songs has the sense of the passionate sermonizing that has been common in black literature and speeches on race. Du Bois ends The Souls of Black Folk with a sincere hope that racism and the color line that he had so thoroughly examined could be—with more efforts like his, undoubtedly—eradicated soon. This hope, we know now, would prove to be premature.

In the following pages unfolds one of the foundational texts of understanding the persistent concepts of race and racism in this grand experiment of America—and thus of understanding America itself. Du Bois’s wisdom on race theory does not always transmit cleanly across the ages. Namely, his crude and chauvinistic descriptions of women, his genteel elitism, and his theory of black leadership feel at odds and out of touch with a current black political moment that embraces feminism, womanism, queer theory, a populist anticapitalist ethos, and decentralized leadership. But this book’s incompleteness as an exact framework for understanding race and movement today makes it all the more of a compelling and necessary read, and understanding what it lacks highlights the layers of nuance and thought that have been added to its tradition in the century since its publication.

Anyone who writes about blackness in America owes a debt to The Souls of Black Folk, and contributes to this accretion over the mother-of-pearl it provides. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is concerned with the same problem of the color line, and builds on Du Bois’s investigation of the results of racism, at both psychological and sociological levels. In the situation of the Bottom neighborhood and in its examination of the insidious effects of racism, Toni Morrison’s Sula is an extrapolation from Du Bois’s theorizing about the veil and his fictional exploration of it in Of the Coming of John. Even today, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me carries with it some of the DNA of Du Bois’s essays and replays some of the fire and anguish of his musings about his own child and the veil. In my field of journalism, the thread between Reconstruction, the history of racism, and the unstable ground of free blackness in America are necessary starting points for any reporting or commentary on race.

Across all genres and media, the idea of the double consciousness is almost considered a priori. The demands of the Black Lives Matter movement and the rejection of respectability politics in much of current black art and cultural criticism are animated by the understanding that double-consciousness is a traumatic psychic burden. The importance of hip-hop and defending it as a legitimate reaction to that burden were predicted by Du Bois’s passionate defense of Negro spirituals. Activists today seek to challenge the delegitimization of blackness and black culture that even makes such a double consciousness exist, and by which whiteness enforces itself as the norm by code-switching, apologia, and shame. Activism also examines the root causes of the problems that still plague black people and asks if the institutions and systems of America can ever truly serve its darker children when, as follows from Du Bois’s analysis, they were originally designed to disenfranchise and marginalize them. Thus, The Souls of Black Folk is also a primer for any young activist or thinker who simply seeks validation in their own interests, character, culture, and questions, or any nonblack person seeking better understanding of a veil that can only be truly known with experience.

Even more than a century later, this book stands as a titanic work of immense foresight and insight.

Reviews for The Souls of Black Folk

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This nonfiction, essay was written in 1903 by W.E.B DuBois, a black American author, sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist. This essay talks about the problems facing blacks in America after the civil war and freedom. It even looks at how Booker T. Washington was not completely helpful in his support of black efforts. Du Bois opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. The author was the first African American to earn a doctorate in the United States and was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rating: This book is nonfiction, was received as part of the summer free audio books for young people. The author made significant contribution to rights of blacks and Asians in both the US and in other colonies. This is an essay that spells out what he thinks is needed to advance African Americans. I rate it 4 (nonfiction)

[benuathanasia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fairly interesting look at life - predominantly in the south - following the Civil War: a period generally known as Reconstruction. I like Du Bois's factual, yet artistic description of the failings - of the North, of the South, and even of black people to secure proper liberty following the war.

[terris-7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful, enlightening book. I learned a lot!!

[deusvitae · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author's attempt, through various narratives, to assist white America in 1903 to perhaps come to a better understanding of the situation and condition of America's black population.DuBois is a masterful author. In this book he does everything from defending the Freedmen's Bureau to describing the plight of black people in a particular county in Georgia. He speaks of his own experiences as a college student, as a teacher, and of the loss of his own child to illness. He preserves the tunes of many a song and ends his book with a chapter on such songs.Above all things DuBois proves prophetic, declaring that the 20th century would be overshadowed by the "Negro problem" and perceiving that Reconstruction would be looked upon poorly for many generations and could only be seen in a more positive light once black America was re-enfranchised. He provides an important perspective, writing just as a new and quite powerful wave of resentment overcame the South in the form of the Jim Crow laws and even greater restrictions than before, standing a generation removed from slavery and yet with the stories of slaves still ringing in their ears, looking forward to struggle which would take the better part of the century...and after more than a century has still not come to a complete end. Over 100 years later the book remains compelling and a valuable read for any who would still wish to explore the "souls of black folk."

[paulagraph · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I appreciate DuBois’s classic study of race as an historical document, and at times even as a piece of literature. I particularly value his depiction of the political, social and material conditions in the South immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, I question some of his proposals and conclusions. Although his views may have been radical in 1903, many of them now sound paternalistic and outdated. Perhaps that, in and of itself, is a sign of progress.
The Souls of Black Folk, of course, is didactic. It’s also a polemic, for DuBois’s stated aims are to both instruct and convince his audience. Many indications in his prose suggest that he conceived his audience to be “the best kind” of white people, and more Northern, I think, than Southern. I don’t think his arguments are directed toward “the best kind” of Negro. I use these terms because they are his, and because this sorting of people, both black and white, into categories of “best” and “worst,” is one of the things that most irritates me about DuBois’s thinking. He touts The Talented Tenth (although he may not have coined this phrase, it became intimately associated with his ideas) as worthy candidates for a classical liberal education and as the source of leadership for “their race.” He admits the need for a sort of benevolent guardianship (by the Talented Tenth and enlightened whites) over the masses of unschooled and largely impoverished black folks in the South. He says, “the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.”
Besides the Talented Tenth, two other concepts are integral to Du Bois’s thinking, that of The Veil, which is both a physical and social demarcation of difference, and double-consciousness, defined as “a peculiar sensation, . . . this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . . one ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro.”
Although he argues against Booker T. Washington’s preaching of abandonment of political and social goals in order to focus solely on material gains for blacks, Du Bois himself proposes that blacks not fit to benefit from the education he proposes for The Talented Tenth should indeed settle for training in a trade and much more limited aspirations.(Apparently, Du Bois modified these views somewhat later in his life.) On the other hand, Du Bois is often forceful in his defense of equal rights for all blacks, for example, when he states, “Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”
Although many of the social conditions that Du Bois references have been ameliorated over time, some of his observations sound uncomfortably current today, such as the following: “the white folk say it [the county prison:] is ever full of black criminals,--the black folks say that only colored boys are ever sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor.”

[jdhomrighausen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was an Audible impulse buy, but I'm glad I got it. DuBois, an African-American university professor in the early 1900s, wrote this book as a response to Booker T. Washington's plan for the post-slavery black community, and as a documentation of the kind of demoralization, fragmentation, and hopelessness of black America post-Civil War.Washington's approach was pragmatic. African-Americans should stop lobbying for political rights. (Perhaps he felt it would incite too much backlash?) They should not dream of going to college, but of attending technical schools and going into the trades. Black America will succeed by putting their heads down and working hard for economic prosperity, with healthy doses of thrift and sacrifice.DuBois' response was that a culture needs more than bread to live on. African-Americans needed to gain the ability to think about the world they live in, to articulate their experience and what they have to offer to our country. This could only come about through liberal education, not trade school alone. DuBois points out that the teachers at Washington's trade schools were not trained at trade schools, but at black colleges. These colleges also produced needed moral, spiritual, and intellectual leaders of the black community: professors, preachers, doctors, and other professionals.Besides, Du Bois points out, Washington's ethic of "buckle down, work hard" doesn't even work. Du Bois documents the very real economic plight of the supposedly freed men and women. Though they are legally free, they are trapped in a cycle of indebted tenant farming. The few who, through ingenuity and the luck of a few good harvests, save up the money to buy their own land, are often cheated by whites who take their money and run. This and other structural inequalities, such as poor education funding and unstable families due to the heritage of slavery, expose Washington's philosophy for the canard it is - so says Du Bois. This book has made me curious to read Washington and hear his side of the story.Formerly, said Du Bois, the 'best' blacks (the house slaves) and the 'best' whites were intimate, living together and having bonds of quasi-family ties; now they are segregated. How then can we understand one another? What's so sad is that most of this book can still apply today. In some ways, not much has changed for African-Americans living with the legacy of slavery and subsequent political and economic disenfranchisement. As a historical work, Du Bois' book is important to read 113 years later; his bristling literary style, full of high-brow literary allusions, only adds pleasure.

[alcracka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Larsen describes him as "peppery," and I like that. He's civil, but he's quietly laying haymakers. It's an important book. To a depressing extent, when we talk about racial injustice these days, we're still repeating DuBois.

It is nonfiction - essays on the challenges Blacks face in the wake of the Civil War - so be aware, it's not like it's going to have a plot. I'm reading it one chapter at a time between other things; going straight through was making me miss some stuff.

The prologue, with the iconic question, "How does it feel to be a Problem?" and the confession that, looking at white folks, Du Bois sometimes wanted to just "beat their stringy heads," is worth the price of admission.

[dr7rentfro · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book for the first time when I was in my doctoral coursework taking a historical philosophy course. EXCELLENT book! Within two weeks of reading it I was visiting my hometown in the south. While there I reread the book and (WOW!)saw that although we think things have changed, they haven't. The dreams of Dubois in 1904 are still unrealized. I have recommended this book to many friends and colleagues. They have the same reactions to the book. It is a must read and should be studied by all post-secondary students.

[melodyaw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is impossible to rate The Souls of Black Folk too highly. It is a worthwhile read solely for the impact that it has had upon American society, both in its time and in the decades since its 1903 publication. The Souls of Black Folk was a major contribution to the African-American literary tradition, and it is also a cornerstone of the literature on sociology. Beyond its historical and educational value, though, I highly recommend this book to everyone for the piercing glimpses Du Bois offers into the souls of all men and women.W. E. B. Du Bois first came under the spotlight by opposing Booker T. Washington, a prominent member of the African-American community who emphasized the importance of accommodating the policies of race separation prevalent in a Jim Crow society.Du Bois believed that in order to attain suffrage, political representation, and civil rights, American society had to acknowledge the wrongs done to African-Americans and strive to integrate them fully into U.S. society. His book documented the conditions of post-slavery America while simultaneously arguing for improvements in the unequal black and white communities.Du Bois was an impassioned advocate for higher education. While Washington focused on educating blacks for the trades and manual labor, Du Bois insisted that blacks should have access to intellectual education rivaling that available to whites. As Manning Marable states in Living Black History, “Few books make history, and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century.” (96)However, more than simply a revealing microcosm of post–Civil War and Jim Crow society, The Souls of Black Folk offer brilliant glimpses into mankind as a whole, regardless of color. Du Bois discusses religion, politics, history, education, money, morality, music, and mortality. His chapter on death of his young son, his first child, is some of the most impressive, tender, and passionate prose I have ever read.It is easy—at least, it was for me—to pigeonhole Du Bois as a figure who did much for his race in the Jim Crow era, but whose work is outdated and useful only as a historical account. However, this view does Du Bois, and yourself for that matter, a disservice. I found his insight profound and his opinions valuable even after more than a century, and I learned a lot about the nature of people.The salience of The Souls of Black Folk attests to Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of an intellectual tradition, both among black thinkers and, on a grander scale, in the then-emerging field of sociology.Though at times the book seems to be a rather disparate collection of essays loosely centered on African-American (and cultural) identity, that connection serves, in fact,. to emphasize that topic’s importance by displaying the ways in which racism was affecting all areas of African-American life.I have one piece of advice for enjoying this book: I listened to it on audiobook, and I’ve discovered that I tend to pay better attention to stories than intellectual discourse in audiobook format. If you’re anything like me, you may want to read a paperback or e-book. You’ll want to highlight dozens of passages anyway!

[histreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I expected this book to be academic essays into the plight of southern Black citizens. Instead, I found flowing prose and descriptive narratives to recount his travels and share the struggles of "Black people." I especially found the story of his son touching. It is no wonder this has become a classic.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the toughest, most interesting non-fiction reads I've experienced.The Souls of Black Folk was required reading for me this year - although the class only dealt with five or so chapters, I was so intrigued by what I was reading that I had to finish the entire book.Each essay provided plenty of food for thought - but most interesting to me was the essay on the education of former slaves - what was appropriate and what was not. This is a part of history that really hasn't been part of my education, and not only did I find it enlightening, historically speaking, I also found it to be relevant today - for all types. With our focus on getting straight into college after high school (and my experience with some siblings that just doesn't work for), I think what Du Bois has to say is incredibly insightful. Not every person is cut out for a life of academia after high school, and specialized training is there for a reason. As I attend school, and each semester say goodbye to more and more friends who just, for whatever reason, are not coming back, I find myself thinking more about the ideas that Du Bois so eloquently writes down.I recommend this reading. I think everyone should read it - and I challenge you to do so.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful and true book. It is written in a strange, Victorian manner, which was probably the only way it could be published. But the stories of blacks in America are terrific and there is no denying that DuBois was something of a genius. His analysis of what the blacks gave to this country jibes with other books that I have read: music, clearing the land, and the Spirit. He is kinder than I would be to the idiotic white people of the south.

[missbrandysue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

W.E.B. Du Bois narrates his journeys of the South after the Emancipation of slavery. It tells of the systemic racism that was institutionalized during this time. My professor at the University of Texas at Austin told me to read this after discussion of Booker T Washington's book, Up From Slavery. He said this gave a more accurate picture of the time. It was very eye-opening for me since I never studied this literature in my high school or college courses. As an education historian I used this book to make many connections about how African Americans were unfairly treated during the Reconstruction Era and beyond leading to current achievement gaps. It was a very dense book and took a lot of time to get through the content. My copy is full of highlighting, notes, and underlined pieces. I'm a better person for having read it!

[snakeshands · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure there is a way to praise this book higher than I would like to. Even its flaws only make it more of its time, more piercingly relevant, more obviously coming out of its context.I came in expecting a successor to Douglass, someone with one foot in prophetic mode and one foot in smackdown mode, and it's true that Du Bois does both of those things fantastically well. But what really gets to me is just how wide-ranging his skillset turns out to be, from long-form reportage to history and historiography, not to mention all this amateur art criticism around slave spirituals. Like a lot of great American writers of the period, he's insanely well-rounded: He can start with a hyper-detailed description of Atlanta, take you into what became the Historically Black Colleges, show you around dirt-poor sharecroppers and taxonomize them by relative levels of poverty and autonomy, tell funny and sad stories about the characters he's met in his travels, then turn around and use one of them to summarize Booker T. Washington and slice his whole program into little ribbons without losing his cool or his politeness. Two minutes later, you're getting a definition of "the veil" or "double consciousness," which people still have to debate the accuracy of as explanatory tools -- then suddenly some Old Testament-level high rhetoric and moral fury drops on you in great big paragraphs of furious dignity.You can tell he's staking out what he wants to call a moderate position here, acknowledging some things that we in the 21st century would call reactionary (the whole bit about the purported stunted moral character of ex-slaves, the Talented Tenth bit about "uplifting the race", and some very wide generalizing). But I don't know of very many people who ever worked in this short-essay form who ever did this better, or who appear to have had such a powerful effect on a debate by straight-up winning the argument.

[alaskabookworm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I can see why this book is a classic. Despite my 5-star rating, it was very, very tough going for me; painful at times. Nevertheless, extremely worthwhile to get inside the head and passions of an extremely brilliant African-American man at the turn of the century. I suspect a great many of his ideas, arguments, and conclusions would be applicable today.

[marcusbastos-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The collection of essays by W E B Du Bois shows the injustices and misunderstandings that our prejudices develop. The negro bondage and the ideas it spread in american society are explained. The way black folk react and adjust to this human inequality is the main subject of this valuable work. The chapters about the black faith and church are written in a beautiful style. The book sucedes in demonstrate that our prejudices are often the cause of our problems and miseries.

[doowatt34 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You must experience this book by reading it for the first time. I don't know how I left college without ever reading essential DuBois. The book is basically a snap shot of the historical events he witnessed, his observation and relations with people and commentary. The writing style AWESOME, complicated, and balanced, all at the same time. What I can appreciate most is that the book is as much a guide on credit, debt, personal financial loss and charity, as it is on social and political science.Shortly after the war the freedmen contributed $750,000 to their educational betterment, purchased land, started various business enterprises, and saved with Freedmen's Bureau Bank. This showed incredible thrift on their part, a kind of thrift that can be admired even today.

[ostrom_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the great enduring concepts: "double-consciousness."

[kaygsapp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Experience the last two centuries in the lives of Black Americans...feel their plight for more understanding.....to read this is to know why.!

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The black experience is well documented in this work of fiction. Recommend.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” “America is not another word for opportunity to all her sons.” This is my introduction into W.E.B. Dubois and what a fine place to start. This essay collection was written in 1903 but still feels as fresh and relevant, (maybe, even more so) as it was then. He discusses the many indignities of slavery and the racial injustices that continued through his day. I think this is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about slavery and the African-American struggle, which continues, unabated, in 2019.