Just as Barack Obama, “the skinny kid with a funny name”, seemed to spring from nowhere in the summer of 2004 with his electrifying keynote speech in Boston to the Democratic convention, so – on the printed page – did William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) burst into American life in April 1903 as the passionate spokesperson for African Americans. Of mixed French, Dutch and African parents, Du Bois is emblematic of America’s complex relationship to slavery.
The Souls of Black Folk is a loosely linked collection of essays that explored in highly personal terms Du Bois’s prophetic assertion that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line”. It became an almost immediate hit.
Du Bois, once one of America’s greatest social activists, has become sadly neglected, but his work was far ahead of its time. The ideas expressed here not only inspired the renewed black consciousness of the 1960s, exemplified by the differing careers of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also contributed to establishing The Souls of Black Folk as a founding text of the US civil rights movement. This is at once a work of advocacy, rhetoric and literature, a vital thread in the tapestry of American prose. In the acclaimed 2016 novel Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, the narrator describes Sonny reading The Souls of Black Folk in prison: “He’d read it four times already, and he still wasn’t tired of it. It reaffirmed for him the purpose of his being there, on an iron bench, in an iron cell. Every time he felt the futility of his work for the NAACP, he’d finger the well-worn pages, and it would strengthen his resolve.” This is how classics of this calibre work their way into the literary bloodstream.
The young man who would become one of the most famous African Americans of his day had already had a brilliant career at Harvard, where his tutors included Henry James’s brother William, and George Santayana. In 1895, after a stint in Berlin, Du Bois became the first black American to be awarded a Harvard doctorate. He went on to publish pioneering research into the condition of “Negroes in America”, culminating in 1899 with The Philadelphia Negro.
Du Bois, following the example of America’s first great black leader Frederick Douglass, used the essay as a genre in which to address the race question. By 1903, he had accumulated enough material for the volume that would become, in the words of one commentator, “the political bible of theNegro race”.
No one before Du Bois had spoken so vehemently about the depth and scale of American racism, indeed its profound atrocity, or demanded an end to it so vociferously. To make this case, Du Bois seasoned his argument with autobiography, drawing on his own life, from his first experiences as a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his baby son, to his historic, and bruising, split with the moderate black leader Booker T Washington whose Up from Slavery (1901) is another important text in African American literature. There was probably some professional rivalry there, too. The Souls of Black Folk is a commanding, magisterial statement of tremendous authority by a young man who is taking no prisoners.
The Souls of Black Folk might appear to be a collection of essays (each chapter also has a musical epigraph derived from “10 master songs” from the Negro tradition) but it has a powerfully coherent inner structure. Three opening chapters explore the slave history of black America. These are followed by six chapters of sociology, Du Bois’s scholarly forte. To give the book the rhetorical shape of a debate – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – Du Bois concludes with five chapters of “spirituality”, culminating in a cry of freedom.
Within The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois explores the dominant metaphor of “the veil”. In simple terms, Du Bois believed that African Americans possess “no true self-consciousness” but rather a “double consciousness” and must always see themselves as they are perceived by whites “through a veil”.
Du Bois expressed his ideas about this “sensation” as follows: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself 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.”
This concept of African American duality is – writes Henry Louis Gates Jr – Du Bois’s “most important gift to the black literary tradition”.
In turn, the veil metaphor alludes to St Paul’s famous phrase (1 Corinthians 13: 12) about seeing ourselves “through a glass, darkly”. Much of the rhetorical power of The Souls of Black Folk comes from a writer steeped in the language and cadences of the King James Bible.
At times, The Souls of Black Folk aspires to a kind of poetry. In chapter 14, Of the Sorrow Songs, Du Bois addresses the Negro spiritual, those “weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men”. Growing passionate, he asks “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” He concludes with a passage that leads directly to Martin Luther King: “If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time, America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below – swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.”
A signature sentence
“If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two-and-a-half thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then comes, What place in the future development of the South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy?”
Three to compare
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (1963)
Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father (1995)
