★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Souls Of Black Folk
• Author: W.E.B. Du Bois
• Year: 1903 (mine was 2003 Barnes & Noble Classics edition)
• Pages: 189*
• Genre: Sociology, history
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• ISBN 978-1-59308-014-3 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

* Not including introduction, glossary, questions, and other sections.

 

Summary

First published in 1903, this book is a collection of essays and insights into the condition of black Americans at the turn of the century, less than 40 years after the end of the Civil War. The essays are topical — each hitting different points in different ways — while all under the shadow of what Du Bois calls “the color-line”, “race prejudice”, and — more metaphorically — “the Veil”.

Du Bois was born after the Civil War (as were many of the people he describes in the essays), neither of his parents were ever slaves, and he grew up in a Massachusetts village that generally treated him and his family well. He attended prestigious universities (he was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard), so to some extent he was on the outside looking in when he studied African Americans in poor neighborhoods, prepared government reports on the progress of freedmen, and traveled through “the Black Belt” of the South. Yet he found that, to the whites around him, his background and education made little difference.

It is worth noting that Du Bois often disagreed strongly with other black leaders of his time, including the venerated Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. In this book, he devotes an entire chapter to arguing against “Mr. Booker T. Washington”. (The disagreement with Douglass was about “assimilation”, which Du Bois did not believe to be ideal, and Washington’s Atlanta Compromise was anathema to Du Bois.

 

Praise

The most powerful thing for me was noticing how often Du Bois’s words applied to today — as if things hadn’t changed a bit. We (society at large) like to think we’ve made huge strides and done away with the “mistakes” of the past, but upon seeing the tone and phrasing of these essays, I saw much that has never changed, and it was striking. For a book more than a century old, even the language wasn’t terribly out of date.

The word-portraits painted of various people and lives are vivid — some horrifying, some endearing, and many pitiful. The descriptions of economic systems in place in the U.S. (especially the South) at the turn of the 20th Century are concise and sharp.

There are also plenty of quotable sections, most of which I simply noticed without stopping to make a note. Flipping back through, I easily found the following worthwhile quotations:

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”

—page 3

“...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 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 two-ness — 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.”

—page 9

“Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world’s undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery — this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and yet there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained away.”

—page 117

 

Points Off For...

Perhaps oddly, my major complaint about the book is... racism. Not only does Du Bois appear to buy into the white supremacist notion that there are in fact separate “races” of humans, but that some of them are in fact lesser. There are also several references to “the Jew”, “Jews”, “unscrupulous Russian Jews” — and so on — in the context of new merchants in the South exploiting black labor. In the 1950s, Du Bois re-read his own book and noticed these “incidental references to Jews” (his words), and changed them for future publications, either to “immigrants” or “foreigners” (For reasons unknown, the publisher of my edition chose to undo Du Bois’s changes and print the original text.) Du Bois wrote in 1953:

“As I re-read these words today, I see that harm might come if they were allowed to stand as they are. First of all, I am not at all sure that the foreign exploiters to whom I referred... were in fact Jews... But even if they were, what I was condemning was the exploitation and not the race nor religion. And I did not, when writing, realize that by stressing the name of the group instead of what some members of the [group] may have done, I was unjustly maligning a people in exactly the same way my folk were then and are now falsely accused. In view of this and because of the even greater danger of injustice now than then, I want in the event of re-publication [to] change those passages.”

Secondly, and more expected, there were heavy layers of sexism, classism, and elitism expressed, perhaps unknowingly, by Du Bois. I noticed the sexism first; he repeatedly referred to women in terms of their attractiveness or ability to find husbands or how many children they had, while typically referring to men in terms of physical size, job type, or level of wealth and education. About midway through the book, I noticed that when he was differentiating neighborhoods and communities, he wasn’t only using the term “better” to refer to the quality of construction or organization, but to the people themselves, as if people in better circumstances are themselves inherently better than those in worse situations. Once I began looking for it, there it was, quite often.

Neither of the above complaints were part of the main points or content of the book, however. They simply formed part of a disappointing background narrative for the reader and shed more light on what kind of person Du Bois was and the kind of society in which he lived and moved.

 

Conclusion

The earlier essays seemed dry to me, but the book picked up as it went along. More and more, I saw parallels between what Du Bois described and sitations that still occur today, like the one in Oklahoma while I was reading this book, in which a black delivery driver was blocked from leaving a neighborhood by white residents suspicious of his presence. (Unlike the men and women in Du Bois’s essays, the man in Oklahoma had a mobile phone and live-streamed his experience to Facebook.) This was also the first book I’ve read that specifically discussed the time period in question, written by someone who lived then. (Other biographies and histories I’ve read that cover this time period were written by people born later.)

I’m glad I read it. I will keep this, and perhaps read it again and someday let my children find it on the shelf and read it. It’s worth reading, if you haven’t yet.

 

 

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