The Souls of Black Folk

by W. Du Bois

  Every chapter of Du Bois’s book elaborates in some way on the veiled nature of black life or black invisibility. Thus Chapter I serves as one of Du Bois’s efforts to unify the whole. Eight of the chapters of the book had been previously published as essays; five either were written for this book or had already been written but were unpublished. Du Bois had the problem of creating a sense of unity strong enough to convey the effect of a single work, something more tightly knit than simply a collection of essays on the same subject. The clearest unifying thread, with its submerged references to sight, seeing, concealment, the unseen, lies in the metaphor of the veil. The metaphor appears even more complex when Du Bois tells us that in addition to being able to move on either side of the veil, to lift it when he desires, he can also exist in a region on neither side. When he finds out that he is “shut out from their world by a vast veil,” he finds also that he may exist above it in what must surely be a realm of fantasy, imagination, and intellect.

  “Veil” is used in yet another sense in the first chapter when Du Bois tells us that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son ... born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world.” Here the veil is a caul, the inner fetal membrane occasionally enveloping the head of a newborn child, said to foretell luck or precognitive powers. “Second sight” is presumably a desirable “gift,” and it belongs not to all blacks but to Afro-Americans, to black people who exist “in this American world.” Du Bois inverts the meaning of the folk notion of being born with a veil; to him it means a sign not of a blessing but of a curse. The caul, the “veil” (sometimes the two words are used interchangeably among the folk) is not indicative of prescience but of blinding. In this case, “prescience” means an already existing sense of who the black person is as that sense exists, prior to his own existence, in the minds of whites, more post- than precognition. This is the curse of the “double consciousness”—if a gift, a most unwelcome one: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” These two “warring ideals,” one the impulse to join the mainstream society, the other to reject it and define the world and relate to it entirely from a black perspective, exist in tension throughout The Souls of Black Folk. Despite Du Bois’s desire to unite them, they remain to him “two unreconciled strivings” (although without question he identifies with blacks): “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife.” This conflict appears repeatedly—explicitly and implicitly—throughout Du Bois’s book, in the metaphor of the veil and in other ways as well.

  Though the double epigraphs appearing at the beginning of the first thirteen chapters of Souls—the first a quotation from a well-known person or source, the second a musical notation of a phrase from various well-known black spirituals—are apparently intended to show the unity between the two modes of creativity, their actual effect is otherwise. Curiously enough, the identity of the spirituals—or even the fact that they are spirituals—is not revealed until the final chapter, “The Sorrow Songs.” Even after we are told that the line of music beginning the first chapter is from “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” that has no meaning unless we know the song. Even if one is able to sight-read, an ability possessed by very few people indeed, the essence of the spiritual cannot be rendered through musical notation nor in any way except by singers who know the songs and how to sing them. Those musical notations stand as mute ciphers, and rather than indicating, as Du Bois must have intended, that black people and white are in essence the same in that they possess souls, as attested to by the products of their creativity, the implicit message delivered is a grim one: the chasm that lies between black and white is as immense as the social, political, economic, and temporal chasm between Arthur Symons (the nineteenth-century British author of the first quotation) and the creators of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” I do not believe Du Bois intended consciously to express such a negative thought, but the reservations he discloses in several of the chapters, notably Chapter XI, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” and Chapter XIII, “Of the Coming of John,” about the possibility of a significantly improved racial situation, suggest that the idea had indeed crossed his mind.

  Chapter II, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” traces the formation of the veil from the outbreak of the Civil War through the failure of Reconstruction, focusing especially on the part played by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Du Bois outlines the historical circumstances responsible for the situation and condition of the majority of black people at the beginning of the twentieth century. The abolition of slavery resulted in the disempowering of the planter class, and Du Bois indicates the relation of this phenomenon to the gain and loss by black people of the right to vote, the general repression of the black population in order to keep it powerless in every way. In many places in the South, blacks existed in a state of peonage or quasi-slavery, unprotected by law and bereft of the rights and privileges belonging to other ordinary citizens elsewhere. The rigid segregation of the races by law followed; the veil, perhaps more aptly termed the iron curtain, was put into place.

  The third chapter, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” is probably the most arresting chapter of the book because it delves into some of the most crucial and persistent issues confronting black people then and now. Booker T. Washington, whose autobiography Up from Slavery Du Bois reviewed in 1901, was the acknowledged leader of black people and had been since his Atlanta Exposition address of 1895, when he first came into national prominence. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute, initially the foremost institution for black vocational training. He was the most powerful black leader of all time in that he had great influence in both national and state politics. On the national level, Washington controlled all major political appointments of blacks and the appointments of many southern whites as well; he controlled the black press of the nation; and he had the support of a good number of the country’s wealthiest people, mostly northern industrialists. On the state level, his political influence is reflected in his invitation by Governor Bullock to deliver the Atlanta address discussed below—the most significant speech of his career.

  Washington’s policy was one of accommodation: he was willing to agree to segregation, not to insist upon the vote, not to oppose property requirements or literacy tests as prerequisites for voting. His comments to this effect were delivered at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, a display of the state’s progress in agriculture and industry, where he said, to the dismay of us all, these chilling, mortifying words: “In all things purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This was exactly what most southern whites (and many other conservatives, black and white) wanted to hear, for it meant that Washington was agreeing to segregation in housing, education, and public accommodations (restaurants, hotels, travel facilities), indeed in all areas of life in which there might otherwise be casual contact between the races. In southern towns and cities where drinking fountains existed, for example, fountains for blacks would be clearly distinguished from those for whites. The water would likely not be from a cooler, and the fountain itself would probably not be as clean or as modem as the fountain for whites. In regard to voting, Washington said that black men should seek the advice of more knowledgeable white men as to how to cast the ballot. He believed that national policy regarding education for black people should focus on vocational education and not on higher learning in mathematics, science, and the humanities, which he scorned as impractical, of little use in daily life.

  One of the reasons that Washington had such appeal to so many is that he embodied the values of many of the successful nineteenth-century American entrepreneurs (many of whom were in fact his patrons). Born in slavery (1856), Washington in his autobiography describes his ascent to a position of power and influence. His life was a testament to success, and he made sure that his autobiography said so. He embraced t
he materialism of his age as ardently as Du Bois spurned it. His beliefs were not significantly different from those of his rich supporters, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and others. He says in Up from Slavery, echoing the nineteenth-century gospel of wealth, “The more I come into contact with wealthy people, the more I believe that they are growing in the direction of looking upon their money as an instrument which God has placed in their hand for doing good with.” He seemed content to urge blacks to strive to be of service to whites, to ignore politics, to be ever conciliatory.

  Du Bois became the leader of the opposition to Washington and his mode of thought. Though himself hardly a radical at the time and certainly not a black nationalist, Du Bois seemed well to the left of the politic and cautious Washington. Du Bois was a proud, outspoken man, and a fervid defender of the race as a whole. A far more highly educated man, Du Bois was more direct in his speech and more clear in his direction than Washington. He was urbane and a harsh critic (as in “Of the Wings of Atalanta”) of America, especially of the rampant materialism which he felt characterized the country during the nineteenth century. On intellectual grounds he was more than a match for Washington. He had many allies, among them a number of liberal whites, but he had none of the political power necessary to prevent Washington’s being heard and seen by most whites as the spokesman for blacks. The argument between the two men constituted more than an academic exercise.

  In 1895, the year of Washington’s so-called Atlanta Compromise address, the lynching of blacks by whites in the South was rampant and there was concerted effort by the southern states to formalize segregation by codifying it into law. This was all the aftermath of Reconstruction in the South (as described by Du Bois in “Of the Dawn of Freedom”). In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled, in Plessy v. Ferguson, in favor of the legality of separate but equal public facilities for blacks and whites wherever states should so establish such laws, a ruling supporting the legality of enforced racial segregation. We may never know the effect of Washington’s having announced to the nation only one year before that racial segregation was acceptable to black people; we may with certainty say that Washington’s “separate as the fingers” sentiment did nothing to forestall the court’s decision.

  Du Bois’s position on the racial question is well represented by words probably written by him in 1906 on the occasion of the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, a convening at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, by Du Bois of black intellectuals concerned with stemming the tide of racism and segregation. The place of the meeting speaks to the political orientation of the participants, since Harpers Ferry was the first target in John Brown’s daring but abortive plan to stir up insurrection among the slaves of the South through guerrilla warfare. John Brown’s raid was in 1859, and it is in something of that spirit that Du Bois’s reaction to Booker T. Washington is expressed in his third chapter, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Du Bois’s words at Harpers Ferry are these: “We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease.... We want the Constitution of the country enforced.... We want our children educated.... We are men! We will be treated as men. And we shall win!” These words would never have found their way out of Booker T. Washington’s mouth.

  We need also remember that the specifics of Washington’s position are not represented in Du Bois’s essay in their entirety. Booker T. could go so far in his autobiography as to defend slavery and cast doubt upon the rightness of emancipation. In one early passage of Up from Slavery (1901), in the first chapter entitled, significantly enough, “A Slave Among Slaves” (pride-fully and callously asserting his superiority to other slaves, a dubious distinction indeed), Washington makes this astounding observation: “Ever since I have been old enough to think for myself, I have entertained the idea that, notwithstanding the cruel wrongs inflicted upon us, the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did. The hurtful influences of the institution were not by any means confined to the Negro.” If there were any blacks who were actually thinking this around the turn of the century, they were certainly few and far between. Clearly it is a statement intended to curry favor with southern whites, who held to the tradition, seriously and fervently put forth after the Civil War by apologists for the institution of slavery, that slavery, and the southern culture based on it, was not only not so bad, after all, but even beneficial, good.

  Washington goes even further when he casts his lot with those who opposed emancipation on the ground that black people were unable to take care of themselves and did not really want to be free: “In fact, there was pity among the slaves for our former owners. The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them.” The sentiment that blacks not only needed but wanted to be enslaved is entirely in keeping with that of the southern apologists for slavery. Such thinking made Washington dear indeed to the hearts of those who wanted either to minimize the significance of racial issues or to justify the status quo in racial relations; contrary to popular belief, such persons were not confined to the South. His views were far more comfortably received than the views of Du Bois, who demanded for black people the rights of citizenship, a demand Du Bois was later to discover was far less a moral or political issue than an economic one. At the time he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois felt he was dealing with an essentially moral and intellectual issue.

  Every chapter of Du Bois’s book forms a segment of a complex argument, an argument deriving from the political, philosophical, psychological, and temperamental differences between him and Booker T. Washington. Many of these differences stem from the dissimilar circumstances of their births and formative years. Washington’s early years were spent in slavery, and even when he was no longer a slave, he lived in a situation that required conformity to the nascent code of conduct in the postbellum South governing interaction between black and white. He brought something of those habits with him into adulthood. Du Bois’s family lived a far less circumscribed life. Their resources were meager, but they were not impoverished. Du Bois knew early that some of his peers were better off economically than he, but many were worse off. His clothing was not usually new or stylish, but it was clean and kept in good repair. Nor did he live in lavish housing, but it was not segregated, and it was respectable. His father had left when Du Bois was quite young, and though he heard later that he had died, Du Bois knew little or nothing about his father’s fate. In any case he and his mother for the most part had to provide for themselves. They received some help from her family and from neighbors. But in a place where few were rich and most were farmers or small tradesmen, their economic situation did not set them apart from most others in the town of Great Barrington. He did work as a youth, but certainly not in a coal mine. He did odd jobs—splitting wood, making fires, running errands, doing chores. All through high school he worked after school and on Saturdays. To the extent he was not impoverished, he was free. He could interact with his white classmates as peers and was not required to view them as superiors. He had no reason to fear whites, for he had never been a slave nor had he been taught a need for subservience. He was proud of his family heritage, of his black, French Huguenot, and Dutch forebears (his family on both parents’ sides had been free long before the Civil War), and his situation was such that he could compete with whites during his formative years—both physically and intellectually—without fear of being killed or maimed, and he could win the competition, its intellectual side in any case (since he was only moderately good at sports), without fear of reprisal. Du Bois’s boyish altercations with whites during his early years prepared him for a different life nationally and internationally than did Washington’s life. The circumstances of Washington’s life fo
rbade any competition with whites at all and caused a certain narrowness, a circumscription of his thought, a conservative bent. “Nature must needs make men narrow,” as Du Bois put it, “in order to give them force.”

  Du Bois felt entirely the strength of his intellect and desired to exercise it as another might feel and want to exercise the strength of his arm. He fully recognized that he was clearly superior, in the western world’s estimation of quality of mind, in intellectual capacity. He was not among the best black minds of his time; his was among the best minds of his time. None of his contemporaries would equal him in terms of the scope, variety, and quantity of his accomplishments during the course of his long career. As reported above, he had published not only two books before his thirty-second year, but two clearly seminal books in two distinctly different fields, one in history and the other in sociology, either of which would have established its author as an authority and original thinker in its particular field. Washington in no way matched him as a scholar and intellectual. Du Bois dealt with Washington in terms of ideas, pitting his thinking against that of his antagonist. Washington, not needing nor able to compete with Du Bois on an ideational level, exerted political power. He brought to bear against Du Bois, and others who dared to oppose him and the so-called Tuskegee Machine, the power of his newspapers, his national political influence, the power he derived from the support of his thousands of followers, especially those enrolled in the National Negro Business League (which he founded in 1900), the hundreds of graduates of Tuskegee, and the many northern philanthropists, especially those who sat on the boards of directors of organizations touching black interests, particularly educational institutions and philanthropic groups.