In its larger aspects the style is tropical — African. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting accomplishment is a matter of taste. Sometimes I think very well of it and sometimes I do not.

    This book is an important contribution to higher literature by a coloured writer. The author is a professor at Atlanta University. His work found its way into high-class magazines, as The Atlantic Monthly, World's Work, and other leading periodicals. His book is marked by fine literary grace. It is in some respects a cry de profundis. The iron of injustice has entered into his soul. He echoes the bitter cry of his coloured kinsmen: "Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shadows of the prison-house closed round about us all, walls relentlessly narrow and unscalable to sons of night who must beat unavailing palms against the stone."[*]
    He discusses the great race problem which confronts the American people. Education, intellectual, but still more industrial, is the only solution of this problem. "They are rising, all arising, the black and white together."[**] There is a strange pathos in some of the chapters, as that on the Sorrow Songs of his race, some of which are given with the strange, fascinating music to which the are sung. The studies of the Black Belt, the Training of Black Men, the Quest of the Golden Fleece, the Faith of the Fathers, and the Passing of the First-born are a new voice of strange power in our ears. A fine poetical vein runs through these papers.
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    As related to the renewed discussion of the negro problem in this country, the little volume of essays and sketches entitled "The Souls of Black Folks," by Prof. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.), deserves a wide reading. Professor Du Bois has contributed to the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, and is known to many of our readers as a writer of scholarly and well-informed papers relating to the progress of his race. A graduate of Harvard and of the University of Berlin, Professor Du Bois has attained in a few years, with Booker T. Washington, the highest rank among American negro educationists. In his present book, Professor Du Bois emphasizes the need of spiritual and intellectual culture for the negro rather than the more practical and utilitarian ends kept so steadily in view by Mr. Washington in his work at Tuskegee. Professor Du Bois is a man of the highest culture, and he cannot overcome the sensitiveness natural to a man of fine feelings placed in the position that he occupies. There is a natural tendency on his part to interpret the aspirations of his people through his own individual strivings and emotions. The result is truly pathetic; but as a practical contribution to the solution of the educational problem for the black race his essays cannot be regarded as of equal value with the widely published lectures and addresses of Mr. Washington. Nevertheless, they well repay reading, representing, as they do, a phase of thought that has, perhaps, been too long neglected by some of those who would deal with the problem as a whole. Of the literary quality of the essays too much cannot be said. No book of similar character has been printed in recent years that equals this little volume in power or grace of expression.
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 Notes: "Negro" is not capitalized in the original text. Also, due to formatting differences between the original periodical and this html version, the sketch is not in its precise position. I was unable to find the artist's name. The portrait was obtained via screen capture software and, with the exception of slightly enlarging the image for easier viewing, is presented here "as-it-was."  [RWW]

    The Souls of Black Folk. By W. E. B. DuBois. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 12 mo. pp. viii+265, cloth.
    In point of literary excellence this collection of articles by Dr. DuBois is entitled to a place in the first rank of the varied and ever-increasing literature of the "race problem." To the student of the question, to him who is concerned with more than its superficial manifestations, this book is an interesting and valuable study; to him who is looking to the most highly educated, easily the most intellectual man identified with the negro race, for a deliverance containing something of helpfulness and hope, it is a distinct disappointment.
    Throughout the book is tinctured with bitterness, a bitterness unfortunate even though pardonable and easily understood by those who are acquainted with something of the life of its author. It is at once a protest and a plea; a protest against the identification of the individual with the mass,--a plea for public and personal consideration unaffected by questions of color or race. This does not mean to my comprehension of the book an appeal for "social equality" between white and black, as the world understands that term, a braking down of social barriers between the races as races, but rather a plea for individual treatment based upon individual character and deserts.
    This runs through the book and dominates its entire tone, and after one has finished it and put it down, let him turn back to its very beginning if he would reason for himself upon the question of the attitude of the white race toward those whom the author calls black. He may learn there something of the force of instinct and heredity which exhibits itself in childhood, and so often in maturer years stifles even the voice of sympathy and reason. These pages tell that it was not as a man seeking a school in the South that the author first learned to feel that he "was different from the others;" it was in far off New England, and even as a child, that he first awakened to the presence of "the shadow of the veil."
    The statement of the position of Booker T. Washington may be fair enough in its essentials, possibly, but when we read his criticism of it we are prone to ask, "What, then, would Dr. DuBois have done?" To appeal to reason and sympathy is well enough, but what of a propaganda based upon "demands?" It matters not how much of abstract "justice" or "right" may be behind the move, the history of a long series of "demands," enacted into laws and backed by force, is so recent that he who runs may read the fate of similar efforts in the South. Dr. DuBois is too thoughtful a man to countenance any such suggestion,--yet until one is prepared to go as far as may be necessary along the line of insistence it is difficult to understand the wisdom of taking issue with Principal Washington's course.
    Much might be said by way of moralizing upon the frame of mind which leads to a casual reference to Sam Hose as having been "crucified,"--so also might we upon such a sketch as that entitled "Of the Coming of John,"--but the moralizing would be as barren of any possible good as was the incorporation of this story in the book.
    Despite the cry of the "negrophobist" already raised in some quarters to anticipate the suggestion, the fact remains that to one reared among the negroes of the South--to one who is living a life of daily contact and association with the masses of these people--to one who has enjoyed their confidences and listened to their recitals of grievances and wrongs personal and peculiar to themselves,--to this man it is not "the souls of black folk" thus laid bare. Herein may the really thoughtful of those who consider America's "race problem" find food for sober reflection,--for here may they learn, perhaps for the first time, that possibly already this problem is become "the problem of the color line." Here also may they read of life that is tragedy in itself,--tragedy that needs not the setting of the stage to evoke the pity of the human heart. To such as these this book suggests a moral upon its every page; by the many to whom "the problem" they so knowingly discuss presents but a single hue, it will be used to bolster up time worn theories of "the negro question."
 

     The problem of America in the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line. In a series of fourteen essays the author sketches the spiritual world in which 10,000 [sic**] Americans live. He studies their emancipation and its effect upon them, their present leaders, and above all their training and the relations between master and man. All this is matter of very deep interest. The author is of those whom he studies. From within he raises the veil that shrouds the black world from the white, revealing "the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, the struggle of its greater souls." Before each essay stands a bar of music, a snatch from one of "The Sorrow Songs," the haunting melodies "which welled up from black souls in the dark past." This appears to be a very remarkable and valuable book. ————————

 RW's Note 1: * "du Bois" is presented here as in the original.
RW's Note 2: ** "10,000 Americans" was printed in the original.

    In many respects a remarkable book, and one to be read well and considered seriously, is "The Souls of Black Folk," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Messrs. Constable amd Co., per Dymock's). We bear a good deal of the colour question in our politics, and many legislative nostrums are being tried in regard to it. But we have no serious colour question here as the United States of America have in the negro problem. It is a problem self-created by the slavery system of the past, but it is nevertheless, very real, and calls urgently for solution. In portions of the country the solutions tried are the inexpressibly brutal ones of the faggot and the petroleum tin—eforts to deal with the ebullitions of an animalism (which once was covertly encouraged) by means too savagae [sic] for realisation outside the communities in which they have, alas, come to be treated as at least "necessary" evils. And in the political world the attempt at solution is open and flagrant and dishonest tampering with the Constitution and interference with justice. Yet much as we may condemn the terrible methods used by sections of the whites in Amerlca towards their coloured fellow countrymen, we are bound to admit that the problem is both patent and puzzling. The maintenance of the white race and adherence to principles of constitutional equality and justice do not seem compatible. There is hope—for the negro—in the work of such men as Booker Washington with his Tuskegee Institute and the co-operative farming associations, but just as the white birth-rate falls and the black race maintains its fecundity does the problem become the more complicated from the white standpoint. In the series of essays comprising this book Mr. du Bois [sic], himself a man of colour, deals pathetically and intelligently with what is not merely an American, but really a world-wide problem. There are nearly ten millions of coloured men ln the southern States of America, and they are increasing at a ratio infinitely greater than the increase of the whites. Nearly two-thirds of them cannot read and write. Their rulers are to a large extent to be blamed for that particular state of things, but some sections of the white community would have it maintained. These claim that the most dangerous element of the coloured population—to them—is precisely the element which has had some educational advantages. "The Souls of Black Folk" will help to an understanding of some of these matters from the point of view of the coloured people themselves. It is a book to be read—and pondered over—both for its intrinsic literary merits and the message it conveys.
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 Note 1: "Negro" and "Coloured" were not capitalized in the original text. Other misspellings are identified.
Note 2: Dymocks still exists as a bookseller in Australia. For its history read "The Dymocks Story" on the web.

38. The Soul of Black Folk—DuBois. [p.12]

The books of the library are available to all the pastors of South Dakota, and are proving of inestimable value, especially to the missionary pastors, who are doing heroic work on small salaries, which do not admit of much expenditure for books.

      The past month books have been received from leading authors and public men of the United States, Canada and Hawaii. In most instances the contributions bear autographs of the authors and public officials, who are aiding in building up this collection. The fourth installment from this source follows:  [The list starts....][p.721]

 Prof. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folks," with inscription: "May the printer, the link between thought and deed, bring into being a real brotherhood of men." [at p.722]

 Du Bois was perceptive in identifying the two dominant and visible components of black identity -- the American and Negroid. The duality is real. It could be argued that almost all other components of the identity constructs today are either directly or indirectly connected to these two dominant components. Even more real and perceptive is the notion of the warring ideals. Both Afrocentrism and Americentrism reflect attempts to ditch one experience for the other. In their schizophrenic attempts to ditch one dimension for the other, both Afrocentrism and Americentrism reflect this tension between competing ideals. The fact is, as Du Bois perceptively argued, neither side would or should give up for the other. Both are intrinsic and relevant to understanding the true identity of the black American.

 I submit that the area of intellectual inquiry today known as Postcolonial Studies which amongst other things, shows Euro-American scholarship especially, though not exclusively, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a series of constructions of otherness, began neither with the publication of Edward Saïd's Orientalism in 1978 nor with Gareth Griffith's The Empire Writes Back (1989) but with Du Bois' scholarly research work. It was in The Souls of Black Folk that there was the first real attempt for the margin to write to the center. Du Bois had therefore laid the groundwork for the move from an activist to a textual culture that is a characteristic of most academies today, especially since the 1970s.
 As for the legacy of Du Bois classic, I think it is to minority, black or Third World discourse, what Aristotle's poetics is to literary criticism. Everything else that has been said since this history-making text was published is something of a footnote. I agree with those who state that Du Bois' book served as a kind of harbinger of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and Martin Luther King, Jr. etc. But to this list must be added Langston Hughes, (who acknowledged that The Souls was the first book that he read on his own) [,] Countee Cullen, Claude Mckay and Jean Toomer. Leopold Sedar Senghor, Leon Gontran Damas, Aimé Césaire and Peter Abrahams are also unforgettable contributors to the same cause. We cannot, I believe, properly understand Steve Biko and his Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa without an awareness of some of the issues first raised in The Souls.

 Du Bois's dedication to authenticating a wholly black voice by drawing upon literal and figurative evidence is worked out with great care in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but it is in The Horizon we can see how, even in curt periodical form, the artful weaving of arguments so well articulated in The Souls of Black Folk offers a new way to think about periodical documentation and the very concept of reading the color line.

 Interpretation is clearly a politically motivated act in each short story. Each protagonist's dream is spelled out in explicit detail. Upon each protagonist's return to his hometown, local men reinterpret their dreams in such a way that the local white and black communities feel threatened. Such reinterpretation denies the protagonists' attempts to achieve justice and equality. However the ending of each short story is unsettling, not only in its representation of lynching, but also in its charge to interpret lynching. The decision to represent lynching in lyrical terms prompts readers to see lynching as a loss of social power. Lynching is a desperate social act, instigated through fear of social equality.

     Content analysis is used to analyze lyrics from the two types of musical genres, the sorrow songs born out of the experience of slavery in the United States and Chimerenga (rebellion) songs created and arranged by Zimbabwean musician, Thomas Mapfumo, who helped to inspire the liberation struggle against colonialism in Zimbabwe.
     [ . . . . ]
     Just as the sorrow songs were borne out of the experience of slavery in the United States, the Chimurenga songs were a reflection of revolutionary struggle against colonialism in Zimbabwe. Just as African Americans wore the veil and lived with double consciousness, Black Zimbabweans experience the veil as a result of internalizing foreign ideas and practices from the British colonizers.

     The sorrow songs highlighted in The Souls of Black Folk and the Chimeranga songs created by Thomas Mapfumo were both socially constructed out of the experiences of Black people living under oppressive social structures. The music emanated from their experiences and helped them to fight back. W.E.B. Du Bois believed all art should be propaganda with the goal of uplifting the lives of African Americans. The sorrow songs in his book carried multiple meanings and were used by slaves to escape from oppression in both physically and spiritually. The sorrow songs, given their double meanings, were examples of double consciousness.
     Chimeranga music carried multiple meanings also. For some, the songs were a call to action and to pick up arms against the colonizers. For others, the songs had partisan leanings and seemed to favor only the ruling party.

 In this text I examine the metaphor, "second sight," as a signifier of the concept of double consciousness, described in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I observe how the metaphor operates to express various perceptions of double consciousness as intrinsic to the African-American. As such, I provide a close reading of second sight in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-3), noting the ways in which her portrayal of second sight as a biological inheritance transforms the metaphor from a signifier of double-consciousness to a signifier of blackness. I subsequently move eighty years beyond Du Bois and Hopkins to scrutinize the depiction of second sight in Gene Rodenberry's popular television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). In doing so I illuminate the ways in which Du Bois's metaphor continued to be relevant in popular culture at the end of the twentieth century. I argue that the three texts depict second sight as a racialized knowledge and reveal a concurrence that race is corporeal and fixed. However, while Hopkins's text asserts that the African-American will, by way of race, inevitably develop "second sight," Du Bois and Rodenberry articulate that it is not race, but culture that leads to the successful development of such skills. In examining second sight as a racialized and coded signifier relevant beyond its inception, I open doors for the continued exploration of the signifier in the American literature and popular culture of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 Those mythic structures which have significantly defined and supported the idea of "America" have consistently ignored the contribution, or even the very existence of the American black population. Meaningful participation in the promise of these myths, loosely bound up in the notion of The American Dream, and defined in texts such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, has been systematically denied to America's black population. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk initiated a vigorous literary attempt to recuperate black self-esteem, to independently fashion black identity, and to create an environment in which blacks and whites could contribute equally in future prosperity and progress. To forward his agenda, Du Bois undertakes a relentless deconstruction of prevalent white American traditional and mythic misconceptions, and imaginatively proposes alternative mythological constructs. This study investigates Du Bois's representation of the significance of myth to the black experience in America, and the discursive response contained in subsequent African-American texts: namely, in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

For Du Bois, a politics suitable to counter Jim Crow had both to uplift the backwards black masses — to assimilate them to the constitutive norms of modernity — and to heed the ethos of the black folk. In short, it had to be a politics of modernizing "self-realization" that expressed the spiritual identity of the folk — what in the book I term a politics of expressive self-realization. Du Bois envisions black elites — the so-called "talented tenth" — as deploying the politics of expressive self-realization to rule and uplift the black masses. Elite control of black politics can be authoritative and effective, he argues, only if it expresses a collective spirit that unites black people.

Henry Davis sought to prepare students for jobs and opportunities for "tomorrow," not just the reality in which they lived. Despite the prevailing ideas that Blacks only needed rudimentary or industrial education, Nellie Hunter pushed college and university training. Whether it was a directive to "hold your head up," a common goal to prepare students for tomorrow rather than today, or the use of a school motto to inspire, participants sought to instill ambition, hope, and pride in their students.
     As a consequence, participants employed double consciousness to challenge White supremacy and White racism directly in their schools — carefully and responsibly. [p.137]

. . . James Weldon Johnson, the composer of the “Black National Anthem,” lifted every voice and sang the praises of The Souls of Black Folk, for having a "greater" impact "upon and within the Negro race than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin." It is difficult to understand where Du Bois was coming from in Souls without having traveled with Harriet Beecher Stowe to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published fifty years earlier, in 1852. "The scenes of this story," Stowe wrote, "lie among...an exotic race, whose...character" was "so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race." In black people’s "lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness," she wrote, in "all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life."

Uncle Tom’s Cabin put forward the racist idea of complementary biological race traits, of the humble, soulful African complementing the hard, rational European. The fourteen essays in The Souls of Black Folk reinforced this idea. From Du Bois's title, to his writing style—pairing the verses of Negro spirituals with those of European poets—to his content, Du Bois carried the idea of complementary race traits into the twentieth century. It would be a few decades before he would renounce this thinking.

Du Bois ends Soul's first and most enduring essay, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," by expressing his dream "that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack." He adds, "we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness." But it is racist to assert that a race lacks characteristics. White people do not lack "simple faith and reverence," and black people do not lack materialism and "smartness."

"In the keystone paragraph of the entire volume, Du Bois elucidates a 'double consciousness' by which black people seeking to get by in a white world have to dissociate their inner black selves from a performative version meant for white consumption."
"Anyone who writes about blackness in America owes a debt to The Souls of Black Folk, and contributes to this accretion over the mother-of-pearl it provides."

     Given what has been explored regarding the epistemological and ontological lens through which whiteness constructs Blackness, focus will be limited to the notion of double consciousness that involves measuring and judging one's soul by the tape of a white world that gazes upon the Black in contempt and pity. In the case of Du Bois, his feeling of difference, and perhaps his sudden lived experience of being a problem, was the result of the internalization of the perspective of the white newcomer. For Du Bois, this internalization resulted in the experience of twoness, a double consciousness, which yields "him no true self-consciousness." Bracketing the issue of what "true self-consciousness" means, particularly in terms of an authentic, true "racial" self- consciousness, a paradigm case of the interpretation of Du Boisian double consciousness as a manifestation of pathology can be demonstrated within Toni Morrison's rich, fictional text, The Bluest Eye. As I have shown, for Du Bois, whiteness associates Blackness with evil. Blackness is ugly. It is dirty. It is uncivilized. Within the episteme of whiteness, "Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff." Although a fictional character in Morrison's text, Pecola Breedlove has fully internalized the myths of whiteness, particularly the white image of beauty. She has come to see her dark skin, her non-blue eyes, as composed of "cheaper stuff." In Morrison’s text, within the semiotic space of whiteness, blue eyes signify universal beauty. Blue eyes signify perfect descent, giving one the feeling of being proud in body and in spirit. Pecola, unlike Ellison’s invisible man, has so internalized the standard of whiteness that her twoness, her doubleness, no longer appears to be something that she can recognize. The internalized "different voice," as it were, that speaks to Pecola as being a dark problem, as something aesthetically disgusting, does not appear to take place within a soul of "two warring ideals." There appears to be only one voice, the voice of the white demi-god. When she looks inside herself, there appears to be only one soul, one thought, a single striving, one ideal: To be white, to possess blue eyes. However, beneath this apparent "singleness," the doubleness continues to exist, for she is still Black. She engages in a whitening of her soul that is so profound that it results in insanity. Hence, doubleness can lead to profound psychological rupture. The invisible man at least knows that he is invisible vis-à-vis "those eyes with which they [white folk] look through their physical eyes upon reality." Pecola only sees herself "through the revelation of the other [white] world."