The Souls of Black Folk

Overview

The Souls of Black Folk is fourteen chapters and about two hundred and twenty pages, and it does not hold one form for long. There is history, sociology with tables of figures, memoir, polemic, a eulogy, a short story, and a chapter of musicology. Du Bois assembled it in 1903 out of essays already published in the Atlantic and elsewhere, and added new ones, and the joins are visible. He meant them to be. The Forethought asks the reader to receive it as a book written with something of the tumult of the spirit in it.

Every chapter opens with two epigraphs: a stanza of poetry, usually by a European or white American writer, and above it a bar of music with no words. The music is from the spirituals, and Du Bois does not identify the tunes until the final chapter. The layout is the argument in miniature: the Black voice is on the page, unnamed, carrying the European one.

Du Bois was thirty-five, trained at Fisk, Harvard and Berlin, and already the author of a rigorous empirical study of Black Philadelphia. That training shows. What is new here is that he stopped believing the facts would be enough.

The argument

Chapter I, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, sets the two terms the book runs on. The veil is what separates the races, seen from the inside. Double consciousness is the effect of it: no true self-consciousness, only a self glimpsed through the revelation of the other world. He opens with the question people ask him indirectly all his life, how does it feel to be a problem, and with the memory of the schoolgirl who refused his visiting card.

Chapters II to III turn to politics. The Dawn of Freedom is a history of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the closest thing to a reconstruction of the South actually attempted, admired for what it did and mourned for its abandonment. Then the famous chapter on Booker T. Washington. Du Bois grants Washington’s achievement and his tact, and then says plainly what the Atlanta Compromise cost: it asked Black Southerners to give up political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education, in exchange for industrial training and Northern goodwill, and in the years since, disenfranchisement, legal inferiority and the withdrawal of aid from colleges had all advanced. The criticism is measured, which is what made it dangerous.

Chapters IV to IX are the empirical heart. Of the Meaning of Progress returns to the Tennessee hill country where Du Bois taught school in two summers as a student, and finds the cabin gone, the school replaced by a plainer building, and Josie, his best pupil, dead of overwork. The Wings of Atalanta reads the new Atlanta as a runner distracted by gold. The Black Belt and The Quest of the Golden Fleece take the reader through Dougherty County, Georgia, county by county, plantation by plantation, and show how the cotton crop lien produced a debt peonage that emancipation had not touched. Of the Sons of Master and Man examines the actual points of contact between the races, physical, economic, political and intellectual, and finds all of them narrowing.

Chapters X to XIII turn inward. The Faith of the Fathers describes the Black church as the social centre and traces the preacher, the music and the frenzy back to Africa and slavery. Of the Passing of the First-Born is the death of his eighteen-month-old son Burghardt, and it is the one chapter where the argument breaks, since the father finds himself half grateful the child will not have to live behind the veil. Of Alexander Crummell is a portrait of a life spent fighting three temptations: hate, despair and doubt. Of the Coming of John is a short story about a Black student and a white student, both named John, and it ends in a lynching.

Chapter XIV, The Sorrow Songs, names the music at last. Du Bois argues that the spirituals are the one true American gift of art and the sole record of a people’s inner life under slavery, reads them as evidence, and traces some back to a great-great-grandmother’s song in a language nobody in the family still understood.

How to read it

Read chapters I, III and XIV first if you are short of time. They are the idea, the political fight and the aesthetic claim, and the rest of the book hangs between them.

Read the chapter on Washington alongside something of Washington’s own, the Atlanta address or Up from Slavery. The dispute is much better than either side’s summary of it, and Du Bois’ case is not that Washington was wrong about work.

Do not skim the statistical chapters. The quiet, patient accumulation of acreage, tenancy and debt in the Georgia chapters is doing the argument’s real work, and the rhetoric elsewhere is earned by it.

Read the epigraphs. When you finish the book, go back and look at the pairings again: Byron or Schiller set over a bar of a spiritual whose words you now know.

The prose is high Victorian and deliberately so, full of inversions and apostrophes. It can read as ornate to a modern ear. Notice that Du Bois is writing in the most elevated register available in English at a moment when Black Americans were being told they were fit only for manual training, and that the style is part of the case.

Questions it raises

• Is double consciousness an injury to be healed, or a second sight worth having? Du Bois seems to say both.
• Washington argued that political rights without economic power are empty. Does chapter III answer that, or change the subject?
• Du Bois wants a talented tenth educated in the liberal arts. Is that a strategy for a whole people, or for the people most like him?
• The book alternates hard social data with elegy and fiction. Does mixing them strengthen the argument or let a reader treat the data as mood?
• The sorrow songs are called the only true American music and also a record of unspeakable suffering. Can one thing be both a people’s art and the evidence against a nation?
• More than a century on, which of the barriers Du Bois catalogues have moved, and which have only changed name?