The Souls of Black Folk

by W. Du Bois

  It might not be too much to say that Du Bois’s conception of his subject as reflected in the title of his book and as related to the spirituals owes its existence to Douglass’s utterance some half-century earlier. The spirituals express the soul of the slave, and if a person listens attentively to them, their sounds “shall pass through the chambers of his soul; and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.’ ” In other words, Douglass precedes Du Bois in asserting, using nearly the same words, that the “souls of black folk” are revealed in the “sorrow songs,” though Du Bois’s discussion of the topic is much more detailed and comprehensive than Douglass’s.

  Insofar as the fact of the existence of slavery in this country is of significance and insofar as the history of the relation of black and white is central to the meaning of American culture, The Souls of Black Folk is an American classic. Whether one agrees with Du Bois—or with Booker T. Washington, for that matter—is not at issue. The point is that Du Bois in his book raised the issues that stood in opposition to the sense of reality and actuality posited by Washington’s book. Without the existence of The Souls of Black Folk, interested people, and, indeed, the nation at large, could easily have believed that Washington’s version of how things stood between black and white was in fact the true and only one. There were other ways of seeing things, and Du Bois presents some of these other perspectives. The Souls of Black Folk, for example, chronicles the true genesis of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the organization of militant black intellectuals and white liberals and socialists that allowed for the possibility of meaningful opposition to the Tuskegee Machine. The book offered a candid black voice, rather than a weak voice simply echoing what the society in general, the white South in particular, and especially those northern entrepreneurs turned philanthropists, wanted to hear. The Niagara Movement, spearheaded by Du Bois, which led to the establishment of the NAACP, came in 1905, two years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’s book undoubtedly assisted him in becoming the leader among black intellectuals opposed to Washington.

  The Souls of Black Folk has not been generally known as a classic text in American Literature, though this paperback reissue of it, and the fact that it has been in print for a good while, should add to the impetus to move it into that category. I rest with the claim made earlier that there is no American thinker of his time who may vie with Du Bois in terms of the depth and breadth of his achievements. His versatility alone is far greater than that of most American intellectuals, who tend to be somewhat narrow in the scope of their thinking and in their capacity for action. Of course the same tides against which Du Bois fought during his lifetime are responsible for his not having received the recognition he so clearly deserves. Souls is not a literary text per se, though it has literary qualities. It is a text of some formal interest, but it would be something of a perversion to pursue its formal qualities alone. Surely no formalist would disagree. It is a human text, and its chief metaphor, “souls,” makes reference to basic assumptions about western culture and mythology. “If you take stock in souls,” as Huck Finn might say, “then you can’t distinguish between their colors, because souls have no colors.” If you distinguish, then you obviously don’t believe in what Americans say they believe in. Du Bois believes that black and white may interact in a humane way if whites recognize that blacks have souls (which probably means, at base, human feeling) just as they do. The Souls of Black Folk is an appeal for that recognition, an appeal that, if we may judge from Du Bois’s subsequent approach to racial issues, fell on deaf ears. Du Bois never abandoned reason, but after this book he never felt again that the matter was an issue for understanding and goodwill alone. Economics seemed far more pertinent than it did before. Goodwill and rationality assumed their proper perspective in Du Bois’s thinking.

  —DONALD B. GIBSON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made to the libraries and librarians of Rutgers, Princeton, and Columbia universities for unstinting aid in the carrying out of this project. I want also to thank my colleagues at Rutgers University who have discussed Du Bois with me or in other ways contributed to my understanding of the man and his work, chief among these being Arnold Rampersad, whose chapter on The Souls of Black Folk in The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois is exemplary as an exquisite model of a way to approach the text from a largely literary perspective. I want finally to express gratitude to John Seelye for his support, encouragement, and forbearance during a difficult time.

  —D. B. G.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Andrews, William, ed. New Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  Clarke, John Henrik, ed. Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

  Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900- 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974, pp. 15-25; 233-36.

  Graham, Shirley. His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971.

  Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader 1856-1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

  —. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

  Kaiser, Ernest. “A Selected Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Freedomways, Winter 1965, 207-13.

  Logan, Rayford W., ed. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Profile. New York: Hill ana Wang, 1971.

  Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.

  Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 68-90.

  Savory, Jerold J. “The Rending of the Veil in W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk,” CLA Journal, 15, no. 3 (March 1972), 334-37.

  Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Louis R. Harlan, ed. New York: Penguin, 1986.

  Weinberg, Meyer, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

  To

  Burghardt and Yolande,

  the Lost and the Found

  THE FORETHOUGHT

  HEREIN LIE buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

  I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.

  I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, 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.

  Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written.

  Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly, The World’s Work, The Dial, The New Wo
rld, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

  Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, 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?

  W. E. B. Du B.

  Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.

  I

  OF OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS

  O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand.

  All night long crying with a mournful cry,

  As I lie and listen, and cannot understand

  The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,

  O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?

  All night long the water is crying to me.

  Unresting water, there shall never be rest

  Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,

  And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;

  And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the

  sea,

  All life long crying without avail,

  As the water all night long is crying to me.

  ARTHUR SYMONS

  BETWEEN ME and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

  And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

  After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

  This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow ot a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, tne powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.

  Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villain ies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—

  “Shout, O children!

  Shout, you’re free!

  For God has bought your liberty!”

  Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty,
forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—

  “Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

  Shall never tremble!”

  The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

  The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o‘-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watch-word beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.