- Length
- 288 pagesNorton Critical Edition, 3rd ed. 2018
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Souls of Black Folk
Fourteen essays that gave American thought the colour line, double consciousness and the veil, written by the first African American to take a Harvard doctorate. It is at once sociology, autobiography, political argument and elegy, and it has never been out of print.
- Date
- 1903
- Author
- W. E. B. Du Bois
- Region
- Atlanta, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
In print continuously since 1903, and the book from which almost the whole of twentieth-century African-American thought descends.
What the book says
Fourteen essays, each opening with a bar of music from a spiritual, on what it is to be a problem. Du Bois begins with the question nobody asks him directly and everyone means: how does it feel to be a problem - and observes that a whole people is approached as a question to be solved rather than as people with questions of their own. From this comes the book's central concept. The person on the other side of the colour line is granted no true self-consciousness but sees themselves through the eyes of others, measuring their soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt: a double consciousness, two warring ideals in one body, and a longing to merge them without losing either. The essays that follow work outward - the failure of Reconstruction and the Freedmen's Bureau, the economics of the Black Belt in Georgia, education and its purposes, the spirituals as a body of thought - and one of them is a direct and courteous demolition of the most powerful Black leader in America. It closes with the death of Du Bois' infant son.
What it argues
That the position of Black Americans is not a problem within the society but a fact about the society, and that describing it requires being inside it. Double consciousness is the philosophical core: a person who is always seen through another's eyes acquires a second sight, painful and genuinely clarifying, since seeing how one is seen is knowledge that those on the other side of the veil do not have. The political argument follows from it. Du Bois holds that a group stripped of the vote cannot protect any gain it makes, that industrial training without higher education produces workers and not leaders, and that a talented tenth must be educated for the whole to advance. The book also does something formally new: it treats the spirituals as thought rather than as folklore, giving each essay a bar of music alongside its epigraph from European poetry, so that the two traditions face each other on every opening page.
What it answered
Booker T. Washington's accommodationist programme, and the broader assumption that the question was what should be done about Black Americans rather than what they thought. Du Bois had trained as a sociologist in Berlin and at Harvard and had produced The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, a study of extraordinary rigour; part of what this book answers is the limitation of that method, since he had come to think that the facts alone did not move anyone who did not already want to be moved.
How it argues
By changing register from chapter to chapter, deliberately. Some essays are sociology with figures; one is a short story; one is a memoir of teaching in a Tennessee hill country; the last is an elegy for his son that says the child is fortunate to have escaped. The variety is the method: Du Bois is arguing that a condition of this kind cannot be conveyed by data alone, and the book demonstrates it by using data and then showing what data leaves out. The prose is elevated, deliberately literary and, in the best chapters, extraordinary.
The moment
The nadir of American race relations. Reconstruction had been abandoned, segregation was being written into law across the South, disenfranchisement was nearly complete, and lynching was at its height - Du Bois described the moment he learned of a lynching victim's knuckles displayed in an Atlanta shop window as ending his belief that scholarship alone would answer anything. He went on to help found the NAACP, edit its magazine for twenty-four years, organise five Pan-African congresses, and become one of the most prominent intellectuals of the century.
How it travelled
Into everything that followed. The book made Du Bois the intellectual leader of the opposition to Washington, and the split it opened organised Black American politics for a generation. Its concepts became common property: the colour line, the veil, double consciousness are used constantly, including by people who have not read it. It shaped the Harlem Renaissance, is claimed as a founding text by African-American studies, sociology and Africana philosophy, and has been taken up in postcolonial theory well outside America.
The strongest objection
That the talented tenth carries an elitism the rest of the book contradicts. Du Bois' argument for higher education rests on an educated minority leading the mass, and the leaders he has in mind resemble him - classically trained, at home in European high culture - which sits awkwardly beside the chapters that treat the spirituals and the folk life of the Black Belt as the real inheritance. Later critics, and eventually Du Bois himself, found the formulation inadequate; he repudiated it in 1948, saying he had assumed the educated would use their advantage for the group and had watched them use it for themselves. Washington's defenders make a different objection: that in 1903, with the state offering no protection, a programme of political confrontation was a way of getting people killed, and that Du Bois was arguing from Atlanta University rather than from Alabama.
Why read it
All of it - it is short, and it is one of the few books in this section that is a major work of literature as well as of thought. The first chapter and the essay on Washington are the philosophical core; the chapter on his son's death is the one readers remember.
- First printed
- 1903
- First in English
- 1903
- Digitised
- Yes
Du Bois revised the text slightly for later printings, including changing one word in the essay on Washington. He lived another sixty years, moved steadily leftward, joined the Communist Party at ninety-three, and died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington.
Written in English. The 1903 text is public domain.
Where it stands
Live and canonical. Double consciousness is a working concept in philosophy of race, in social epistemology and in identity theory; the book is taught across several disciplines; and the argument with Washington is still the reference point for debates about accommodation and confrontation.
The passage
the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line
The Souls of Black Folk, the Forethought. Public domain, and Du Bois' own words.
Contested
What double consciousness precisely claims - a psychological condition, an epistemic advantage, a structural fact - is argued in the philosophical literature, and Du Bois' own uses of it vary. Whether the book's programme is elitist is a criticism he later accepted in part. Whether the disagreement with Washington was as absolute as the reception made it, or whether the two positions were closer than either could say publicly, is a genuine historical question. And Du Bois' long later career, including the Communist Party membership and his statements about the Soviet Union, is part of the record and is variously weighed.