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Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil
The text of the 1920 edition is available on the Web. The book contains a series of essays, each of which is followed by a fictional work (short story or poem). While Souls deserves its praise, Du Bois' Darkwater merits wider recognition. In the book he explicitly addressed significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines.
| Table of Contents for Darkwater | |
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Postscript |
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Credo |
| I. | The Shadow of Years "A Litany at Atlanta" |
| II. | The Souls of White Folk "The Riddle of the Sphinx" |
| III. | The Hands of Ethiopia "The Princess of the Hither Isles" |
| IV. | Of Work and Wealth "The Second Coming" |
| V. | "The Servant in the House" "Jesus Christ in Texas" |
| VI. | Of the Ruling of Men "The Call" |
| VII. | The Damnation of Women "Children of the Moon" |
| VIII. | The Immortal Child "Almighty Death" |
| IX. | Of Beauty and Death "The Prayers of God" |
| X. | The Comet "A Hymn to the Peoples" |
This page is divided into sections, wherein you can find online resources pertaining to:
* Internet-available copies of Darkwater itself in various formats;
* primary works by Du Bois, such as essays or poetry, that were or became part of Darkwater but are accessible separately online;
* book reviews and comments by various contemporaries of Du Bois;
* a celebration commemorating the book;
* secondary sources that utilize Darkwater or its component works directly or indirectly as a point of reference (including an encyclopedia profile of Darkwater written by the web site facilitator [info below]); and
* related sources with a bearing on some topic or issue raised in Darkwater.
Clicking one of the above links will situate you at the associated spot below. Robert W. Williams [Bio] LATEST LINK (As of 10 April 2008)
A Primary Work within Darkwater
Posted below is a link to "A Hymn to the People" originally published in 1911.
THE TEXT
Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. 1920. (NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co.)The full text is accessible at:
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library (HTML)http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubDark.html [T.O.C.]
[Note 1: UVA's version retains the pagination from the 1920 edition.]
[Note 2: Also available are .LIT (MS Reader) and .PDB (Palm) PDA formats.]
Project Gutenberg (HTML, plain text, and iso-8859-1 encoded text)http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15210
Google Book Search [link] (PDF format, appox. http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC08784895.... [download page]
Manybooks.net has converted the Project Gutenberg text of Darkwater into various formats for use on PDAs and iPods
http://manybooks.net/titles/boiswebd15211521015210-8.html
Darkwater: The Hands-On Experience
For those wishing to read Darkwater in book form, please consider buying a copy from *Amazon.com* via the links posted here. Webdubois.org would receive a small, highly appreciated fee that would help to maintain the web site.
The following are three good editions of the book (arranged alphabetically by editor's last name).
Darkwater, a "Classics in Black Studies" paperback from Humanity Books,
Darkwater, a Givens Collection paperback from Simon & Schuster, with an introduction by
Darkwater, the Dover Editions paperback with a Manning Marable introduction:
Many thanks.
Robert Williams
PRIMARY WORKS COMPRISING DARKWATER
"Credo." Published initially in The Independent, 57 (6 October 1904): 787, it was included in DuBois' Darkwater.
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Libraryhttp://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubCred.html
"A Litany at Atlanta." This poem was composed, as DuBois wrote, "in the Day of Death, 1906." It expressed rage at the assaults against African Americans in a riot by Whites in September 1906. [See the Atlanta Race Riot web site or the Project Gutenberg's full text version of James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry(NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922); (scroll down to http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11986
"A Litany at Atlanta" is included in The Poetry of the Negro, http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/reader.pl?call=9355&search= [start page]
Note: The poem spans pages 18 to 21 in the original book, but begins on page 40
of the electronic verson. Select "40" from the middle of the drop-down menus at the top of web page.
of the electronic verson. Select "40" from the middle of the drop-down menus at the top of web page.
"A Hymn to the People" was originally published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, 28:2 (October 1911): 619-620. Du Bois delivered the poem at the Universal Races Congress held in London in 1911. It was reprinted in Darkwater with the slightly altered title of "A Hymn to the Peoples."
Accessible at the Ohio Historical Society's online exhibit, "The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920" [as a page image]
http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/...ID=2325&Current=P619 [1st of 2 pages]
"The Damnation of Women." Published in Darkwater, this essay showcased DuBois' views on the equality of women and their exploitation by racism.
Reprinted in The New Crisis, November-December 2000 (printer-friendly format)http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200011/ai_n8904942/print
"The Souls of White Folk." This is the version of the essay which was published by Du Bois in his book, Darkwater (1920). The periodical Monthly Review republished the essay in 2003 (specifically: Monthly Review, vol. 55, no. 6 (November 2003)).
Freely available at www.FindArticles.com (printly friendly format)http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_6_55/ai_111269074/print
BOOK REVIEWS OF DARKWATER
An anonymous review of Darkwater published by The Journal of Negro History (Vol. V, No. 2 (April 1920): 257-258). This journal was edited by Carter Godwin Woodson [bio].
The full text of the review is presented below verbatim and in its entirety (with a note, indicated by a bracketed asterisk, added by RWW):
Darkwater. By W. E. B. DuBois. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, New York, 1920. Pp. 276.
This work is a collection of essays by the well-known author of Souls of Black Folk, The Philadelphia Negro, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, and The Negro. The aim of the work is to show that the Negro problem is essentially connected with the problem of work or wages or education and government which, when solved, will mean also the solution of the race problem. To give his point of view, the author, therefore, describes his childhood, training, and outlook on the world as a Negro. To show the "vast emotional content of the social problem,[*] he has inserted between the chapters, bits of poetry and fancy which interpret the bewilderment, the disappointment, the longing and the faith of millions of men. The work ends with a brief philosophy of duty and death and a story and a hymn looking toward human unity.
This book, therefore, follows the trend of thought characteristic of Dr. DuBois. As in the beautifully written essays entitled Souls of Black Folk he has here put himself forward as a person representative of millions of black men seriously suffering from social proscription. Although his contention that the race problem is interwoven with the economic problems of the country is presented as the reason for directing more attention to this problem, the author does not treat the race question from an economic point of view. This has been the defect of the historical works which Dr. DuBois has written. He is at best a popular essayist with a bit of poetic genius. In all of his discussions of the race problem his mind has not as yet been adequate to the task of scientific treatment of the question. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade is a literary compilation or digest of State and national legislation to curb an evil, but it does not exhibit any relief or a unifying influence. The Philadelphia Negro is an ordinary report on social conditions which a local secretary of the Urban League could now compile in almost any large city in about three or six months and his The Negro is merely a summary of a number of popular works setting forth such history of Africa as a few travellers have been able to learn from the outside. It is hoped, therefore, that Dr. DuBois will take his task more seriously that he may finally write a scholarly economic treatise in this long neglected field.
* Note 1: The quotation mark at the start of this phrase appears to be in error. I was not able to locate within Darkwater either the phrase "vast emotional content of the social problem", or any of its subphrases that might point to a theme similar to the reviewer's.
Note 2: I will observe that the anonymous reviewer (a) did not consider the importance of The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade as a "compilation or digest of State and national legislation", one which various historians of the era acknowledged as meticulous in detail; and (b) did not consider the historical
Download page for the entire Journal of Negro History, Vol. V
http://www.archive.org/details/journalofnegrohi05assouoft
Review of Darkwater by Robert C. Benchley. This is a short review -- more of a commentary -- published in Robert Benchley's Love Conquers All (NY: H. Holt & Co., 1922). Noted for his humorous pieces, Benchley used satire to criticize the conditions which prompted Du Bois to write the book. Benchely wrote of Du Bois:
Perhaps during the war he heard of the bloody crimes of our enemies, and saw preachers and editors and statesmen stand aghast at the barbaric atrocities which won for the German the name of Hun, and then looked toward his own people and saw them being burned, disembowelled and tortured with a civic unanimity and tacit legal sanction which made the word Hun sound weak.
Perhaps he has heard it boasted that in America every man who is honest, industrious and intelligent has a good chance to win out, and has seen honest, industrious and intelligent men whose skins are black stopped short by a wall so high and so thick that all they can do, on having reached that far, is to bow their heads and go slowly back.
Any one of these reasons should have been sufficient for having written "Darkwater."
Perhaps he has heard it boasted that in America every man who is honest, industrious and intelligent has a good chance to win out, and has seen honest, industrious and intelligent men whose skins are black stopped short by a wall so high and so thick that all they can do, on having reached that far, is to bow their heads and go slowly back.
Any one of these reasons should have been sufficient for having written "Darkwater."
As part of the Project Gutenberg text of Benchley's Love Conquers Allhttp://www.gutenberg.org/files/15851/15851-h/15851-h.htm#toc_69
A book review of Darkwater by Robert F. Foerster and published by the well known social work periodical The Survey, Vol. XLIV, No. 11 (June 12, 1920): Darkwater
By W. E. B. DuBois. Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 276 pp. Price $2; by mail of the Survey $2.20.
Dr. DuBois is given to staring relentlessly at just those things upon which many people are careful to shut their eyes. Hence such people will wish that his book had not been written. Actually it is a book so skilfully put together, so passionately felt, so lyrically expressed, that it will be read widely. May it also be read wisely, dispassionately!
By W. E. B. DuBois. Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 276 pp. Price $2; by mail of the Survey $2.20.
The themes which come and go through it, some developed at length, others merely hinted at, are many: black women as mothers, as workers, as victims of masters; children as discoverers of the white man's antipathies, checked in the opportunity to grow and develop; workers elbowed aside, scorned, trodden under by the civilization of East St. Louis; citizens denied representation in their government; travelers deterred by the Jim Crow car; soldiers rebuffed by their white compatriots -- these are samples. The autobiographical reference is frequent. Thus and so it feels to be a Negro -- how long will the white man's conscience sanction depreciation of the black?
But the book is more than an appeal for justice. It is partly an articulate argument. A chapter on politics, for example, is a reasoned statement of the proper role of majorities and minorities in any society, and makes a skilful use, for the purposes of analogy, of the argument for suffrage for women. At a good many points, strikingly in the matter of education, what is asked for the Negro is asked at the same time for the white man.
Behind the European war, whatever the ideals of individuals, was the white man's fierce contention for control of the colored races, yellow and brown as well as black (but was not one colored race inspired also with the white race's ambition?). Since, however, the colored races include two-thirds of the world's population, true faith in humanity, Dr. DuBois declares, requires faith in the colored skin. This faith he seeks to justify, putting Christ and all the Asiatics in the same group with the Negroes -- a lumping together of dissimilars which is surely not to be justified.
A chapter on the possibilities of education begins with the life-story of Coleridge-Taylor, whose heredity was as largely white as it was Negro. At such points as these the skeptical or hostile reader (for whom of necessity the book is written) will wish for greater objectivity.
With Dr. DuBois' recommendation that Africa be developed by and for Africans and not through such exploitation of races as several European governments have sanctioned, many persons will have full sympathy. If the institutions of the civilization that grew up in such circumstances should turn out to be impressively different from those made by white men, there could be no occasion for surprise, and perhaps there would be occasion for congratulation.
I believe that Dr. DuBois has overstressed in his book the points of identity, not only of the colored races as such, but of the white and black races especially; yet I am equally sure that white men have overstressed the points of divergence. The signal service of this book is that it quite magnificently points out the white man's error and makes clear as day the fact that the "race question" is, at least to a great extent, a question of social environment. A book so genuine as Darkwater is a book to respect. It leaves perplexing questions unanswered -- but whose book upon the Negro does not?
Robert F. Foerster.
Note: Darkwater was not italicized or underlined in the original text.
Entire volume of The Survey, Vol. 44 (at the Internet Archive site)
http://www.archive.org/details/surveycharityorg44survrich [43 MB DjVu]
A CELEBRATION OF DARKWATER
"Darkwater: Recital in Four Dominions"Terry Adkins After W.E.B. DuBois.This exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania was held from 14 December 2002 to 2 March 2003. Adkins the artist sought to explore Du Bois' thoughts and activities via the four dominions of music, prints, sculpture, and documents [Adkin's faculty web page].
Various photos of the exhibit and opening receptionhttp://www.upenn.edu/ARG/archive/darkwater/darkwater.html
WHYY TV 12: RealAudio clips by Terry Adkins and Tukufu Zuberihttp://www.whyy.org/tv12/DarkWater.html
SECONDARY SOURCES INVOLVING DARKWATER
"Round Table's Response to Du Bois' 'Damnation of Women'." A discussion of the work and its contemporary significance was sponsored by The New Crisis and moderated by Kimberle Crenshaw. Participants were Kimberle Crenshaw, Johnnetta B. Cole, Ruby Dee, Farah Griffin, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Elaine Jones, Jewell Jackson McCabe, Judy Simmons, and Faye Wattleton.
In The New Crisis, November-December 2000 (printer-friendly format)http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200011/ai_n8914369/print
Introduction to the Roundtable discussion by Kimberle Crenshawhttp://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200011/ai_n8903845
"Du Bois, Darkwater, and Being Ahead of One's Time." Introduction by "From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion" by Marilyn Lake most studies [of whiteness] have conceptualised their subject within a national frame of analysis, charting national dynamics and histories. When overseas ideas are identified as important they are usually conceptualised as external influences shaping a national experience rather than as constituting transnational knowledge. Yet, as Du Bois saw clearly, the emergence of this ‘new religion’ of whiteness was a transnational phenomenon and all the more powerful for that. It produced in turn its own powerful solidarities of resistance. [...]
White men, ...whether in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia or Kenya, looked to each other for sympathy and support, for ideas and practical instruction. They exchanged knowledge and know-how, in particular the uses of the census, the literacy test and the passport as key technologies in building and defending white men’s countries. [...] The targets of the literacy test changed as did its specifications, from the requirement to write one’s name, to demonstration of the comprehension of the constitution, to the ability to fill out an application form in English to a dictation test in any European language. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, the deployment of a literacy test for racial purposes was a key aspect of the transnational process noticed by Du Bois: the constitution of 'whiteness' as the basis of both personal identity and transnational political community. Literacy was used to patrol racial borders (electoral as well as national) within and between nations, and in the process literacy became code for whiteness.
[Footnotes omitted]
Ch. 13 in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, edited by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake [ebook citation], (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2005)
http://epress.anu.edu.au/cw/. . .page=ch13&chapters=h [starting section]
"'Deliberately Using the Word Colonial in a Much Broader Sense': Rabaka writes:
Du Bois was apparently "postcolonial" prior to contemporary postcolonial discourse, a curious thing when one considers that his work has routinely been omitted from the said discourse. He engaged colonialism and "the colonial problem" from his 1895 doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, through to his final pieces of radical journalism in The National Guardian. [ . . . . ] Du Bois's "cognitive mapping" project took into consideration not only the interlocking and intersecting nature of neocolonialism and, as he put it, "the new capitalism," but also racism and sexism.... There is, to my mind, no better example of Du Bois's critical engagement of the dialectics of colonialism and capitalism, and racism and sexism, and the interlocking, intersecting and interconnecting nature of each of the aforementioned than his 1920 monumental pièce de résistance, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil.
[Citations and footnotes omitted]
"The Prophetic and Pragmatic Philosophy of "Race" in The Comet" by Ronald R. Sundstrom [faculty page; personal page]. Sundstrom writes:
"The Comet," a melodramatic short story . . ., is an exceptional piece, because it unambiguously displays DuBois's view of "race" as a social construct. Further, his depiction of "race" as purely the creation of social forces . . . offers a prophetic, but also illusive, humanist vision of the world sans the veil of "race." The content and message of "The Comet," I believe, displays an ironic stance towards "race." A vision, a dark vision, if you will, that saw through the pathology and absurdity of "race," and sought to display the sickness of the American "racial" politic.
[Footnote omitted; italics in original]
In the Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience [APA Newsletters], http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/. . . ./blackexperience/article-sundstrom.asp
[A PDF version of the entire Newsletter is available.]
Profile of Du Bois' Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil written by the web site facilitator, At The Literary Encyclopedia (originally posted on 26 September 2005)http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5758
RELATED SOURCES PERTINENT TO DARKWATER
"The Atlanta Riot: A Discourse [delivered] October 7, 1906," by Francis James Grimke (also Grimké), is a work discussing to the same race riot which fueled Du Bois' "A Litany at Atlanta." F.J. Grimke was a Presbyterian minister and part of the extended Grimke family whose various members were notable for their activism on issues like abolition, civil rights, and women's rights. He provided an explanation of the underlying conditions leading to the Atlanta Race Riot: "progressive, intelligent, thrifty, well-to-do" African Americans were economically and psychologically threatening (RWW's term) to poorer Whites in particular, and also were a direct challenge to the widespread White supremacist ideology holding that African Americans were allegedly inferior as a result of supposedly natural and divinely ordained causes. In Grimke's words: Full text at the University of Georgia Libraries in formats viewable online with DjVu- or Java-based software
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/F294xA8xG8/ [Citation page]
[File can also be saved (downloaded) after it is first viewed online (612 KB)]
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