W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks

I don’t believe I have read any of DuBois writings before this one, except possibly as excerpts in literature classes in the first year or two of college.  I decided I needed to read this seminal work somewhere in the midst of reading The 1619 Project.

 

I expected something very different from what this book is.  I expected a high-level, argumentative, sustained philosophical piece about America’s “problem of the color-line,” something full of footnotes and citations to sociological works.  The book does indeed reach high-level considerations. But it also grounds itself in specific people and stories.  It is certainly argumentative.  But it is interested in painting a broad picture beyond the borders of those specific arguments. It is definitely philosophical.  But it is every bit as humanistic, concerned with the flesh and lived lives, not just matters of philosophical concern.

 

Published in 1903, the book comprises a collection of essays that DuBois had previously published in magazines and journals, such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial.  Together, essays look back at the preceding 40 years and ahead to the whole of the century stretching before him, noting that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (16).  He begins by looking back at the American government’s responses at the end of the Civil War, where it tried to do right, where it maliciously did wrong, and where it gave up altogether.  He then takes a prolonged look at the education of previously enslaved people and their children, taking up argument with Booker T. Washington’s position and looking at his own experience as a school teacher in rural Tennessee.  This latter essay, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” is the first of his personal essays in the collection.  By looking at the political issue of education through the lens of his own lived experience, DuBois is able to include all the factors that play into the continued disadvantaging of Black Americans.  The poverty, the geography, the social barriers, the cultural history—it’s all there in the telling of the lives of his former students and their families.  It’s very much in the vein of what is now common modern journalism, and it’s powerful stuff in literary and mental talents of DuBois.  He then looks at the larger issues of freedom and power, specifically in Georgia and Atlanta, though those specifics are clearly meant to point to the larger national condition.  He observes how the laws and racist customs are designed to hem in and limit Black folks economic futures, and how those limitations affect family relations and individual behaviors.  DuBois then offers a few especially personal pieces, about the loss of his first born still in his infancy, the biography of Alexander Crummel, and a (presumably fictional) short story about two Johns in a small southern town, one Black, one white. He concludes his book with a short essay on the musical and cultural contributions Black people have given to America through their music: “[T]he Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (180-181).

 

DuBois writing is eloquent and powerful, and just formal enough that it requires attention and a slowed-pace to absorb it all.  He opens the book with the statement, “Herein lies buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.”  I discovered that indeed patience was needed, and warranted.  I’m not a fast reader, naturally, but the slower I went, the more I enjoyed and got out of this book.  One chapter I read to myself entirely out loud to feel the rhythm and music of DuBois’s language.  I admired his clarity of thought, his thoroughness of vision, and his literary power to bring it all to the page.

 

There were a few things that troubled me while I read the book.  There were veins of anti-semitism that were difficult to travel past.  The assumed patriarchal stance needled me regularly as DuBois made it clear that he was interested entirely in the matters of men.  Finally, there are several points where, to make his larger argument, DuBois accepts the characterization of many Black people as lazy and shiftless.  Of course, he seeks to explain culturally and economically how that laziness and shiftlessness are created and encouraged, but even accepting such things made me wince.

 

This is the kind of book that will bear rereading and re-engagement.  I will undoubtedly be picking it up again down the road.

 

As a mere side-thought, it occurs to me that The 1619 Project is in some ways a reimagining of The Souls of Black Folks, borrowing its structure, its focus, and its methods to start out the 21^st century as DuBois kicked of the 20^th.