Five-minute digest
The Souls of Black Folk
Summary
The Souls of Black Folk is a book of fourteen chapters framed by a short Forethought and Afterthought, in which W. E. B. Du Bois sets out to show readers what it meant to be Black in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. He announces his subject at once: the great problem of the new century is the color line. Each chapter begins with two epigraphs, a passage of poetry (from Byron, Whittier, Schiller, Swinburne, the Song of Songs and others) and a few bars of music from a spiritual, so that the book is scored, as it were, with the songs it praises at the end. The first chapter, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, introduces the images that have made the book famous: the Veil that separates Black from white America, and double consciousness, the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous world while holding two ideals, American and Negro, in one person. The second chapter is a history of the Freedmen's Bureau under General Oliver O. Howard, praising its schools and judging its failures. The third, Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, is a respectful but firm critique of the Tuskegee leader's Atlanta Compromise: Du Bois honors Washington's work for industrial training and thrift but argues that his program asks Black Americans to give up political power, insistence on civil rights and the higher education of their young men. The middle chapters move between memoir, sociology and argument. Of the Meaning of Progress recalls two summers Du Bois spent as a Fisk student teaching a country school in the hills of Tennessee, and his return ten years later to find his pupil Josie dead. Of the Wings of Atalanta and Of the Training of Black Men defend the university against a purely commercial ideal of education. Of the Black Belt and Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece take the reader by train through Dougherty County, Georgia, examining cotton tenancy, debt and the crop-lien system. Of the Sons of Master and Man surveys daily contact between the races, and Of the Faith of the Fathers describes the Black church, its preacher, music and frenzy. The last four chapters are the most personal. Of the Passing of the First-Born is a lament for Du Bois's infant son Burghardt, who died in Atlanta. Of Alexander Crummell is a portrait of the Episcopal priest who overcame the temptations of hate, despair and doubt. Of the Coming of John is a short story about a young man who returns educated to his Georgia town, with tragic results. Of the Sorrow Songs closes the book with a study of the spirituals, which Du Bois calls the nation's most beautiful music, and a prayer that the book not fall still-born into the world. Nine of the chapters had appeared as magazine essays, chiefly in the Atlantic Monthly and The Dial, before Du Bois revised them; A. C. McClurg of Chicago published the book in April 1903.
Top Lessons
Seeing oneself through two sets of eyes
Du Bois names double consciousness as the strain of being both American and Negro in a country that treated the two as opposed. His aim is not to escape either identity but to merge them into a truer self without losing the older one. The idea gave many later writers a vocabulary for divided belonging.
Disagreeing with a leader in good faith
Chapter III praises Booker T. Washington's achievements before contesting his program. Du Bois argues that honest criticism of a respected leader is a duty, not a betrayal, and he frames his objection as a matter of ends: votes, civil rights and higher learning.
What a university is for
In the Atalanta and Training chapters Du Bois argues that education must form men and women, not only workers, and that a people needs teachers, ministers and scholars trained in the highest learning. His image of conversing with Shakespeare, Balzac and Aristotle makes the case that culture belongs to everyone who can receive it.
Sorrow that sings of hope
The spirituals frame every chapter and receive the final one. Du Bois hears in them grief, faith and an expectation of justice, and he treats them as the nation's great artistic gift, which makes music a form of testimony.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Frequently cited
“One ever feels his twoness,—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.”
“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
“Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique.”
“The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
Frequently cited
“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.”
“Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.”
“the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.”
Medical Lens
The book is not medical, but Of the Passing of the First-Born is one of the notable paternal laments in American prose: a father's account of an infant's illness and death, and of a grief shaped by the son's imagined future under the Veil. Chapter II also mentions the Freedmen's Bureau's physicians, surgeons and hospitals, a brief pointer for historians of Reconstruction-era public health.
- Chapter XI, Of the Passing of the First-Born
The birth of Burghardt, his illness in Atlanta, the watch beside him as the physician comes and goes, his death and burial, and the father's mixed grief and consolation.
- Chapter II, Of the Dawn of Freedom
A summary of the Freedmen's Bureau's work, including its physicians, surgeons, hospitals and asylums for the newly freed.