The Souls of Black Folk

This chapter is Du Bois’s biographical essay on Alexander Crummell, an African-American minister and intellectual of the 19th century.

When Crummell was a boy, he managed to overcome hate, despair, and doubt to make something of himself. Du Bois met him at a Wilberforce University commencement when Crummell was 80 years old, and Du Bois worshipped him because the man’s character was so obvious.

Born in 1819, Crummell was marked by the dark stories that his father told him about slavery, as well as those of his mother, who made him come in at night before slave catchers could steal him away. A New York school master decided to take the boy into his school and educate him despite his race. The schoolmaster was an abolitionist, and, under his teaching, Crummell’s world enlarged, and his commitment to helping people in bondage in the South was born. This dream almost ended before it started when the Episcopal seminary to which Crummell applied to study denied him entry because of his race. In Boston, however, he was able to study privately and was ordained. He resisted and overcame despair.

Crummell examined his people critically and saw that slavery had beaten the decency out of them. He decided to start his own chapel in Providence, where he could teach the best of them and send them out to spread their uprightness to the entire race. The chapel failed. He convinced the bishop to send him to Philadelphia, where there were more African Americans. When he brought his letter of introduction to the Philadelphia bishop, the bishop told him he could have his church, but only if he agreed never to sit at the bishop’s church convention or even ask for representation. Crummell refused.

This humiliating experience almost destroyed Crummell. He went back to New York, where he took over a poor church that could barely support him. He grew sick and frail from poverty. He eventually went to England, earned a degree from Cambridge, and turned to West Africa to do his work. However, no matter where he went, he was unsure of God’s purpose for him. Du Bois notes that this type of wandering should be familiar to any person who has watched the struggle of African Americans. Many of them fall by the wayside, but Crummell continued to work hard to serve others.

Despite his work and fineness of character, Crummell was virtually unknown near the time of his death. Du Bois spent as much time as he could with him at the end of his life. He imagines that when Crummell entered heaven, Jesus was there to greet him and tell him how well he had done. 

John Jones was a native of Altamaha, a town in southeastern Georgia. The whole town saw him off when he took the train north to the Wells Institute. His mother and the black townspeople dreamed of a nicer house, a school, and a wedding when John came home. Whites scoffed at their big dreams, and, in any event, John did not come home for a long time. There was another John—a white boy who was the son of Judge Henderson and who had left for Princeton after a childhood spent playing with the black John. His family and friends also dreamed of all the wonderful things that would happen when their John returned.

At Wells Institute, the black John Jones perplexed the faculty. He was careless, loud, and had poor work habits. The dean suspended him for a term because of his poor behavior, and, for the first time, a note of seriousness seemed to come into John’s face. When he returned to the institute the next term, he worked hard. His rough early life made learning difficult for him. He made it through the prep school curriculum and graduated from college. He grew more dignified and aware of the narrowness of his options as a black man. He was a little bitter and dreaded the idea of going back to Georgia.

He went to New York with a singing group that performed to raise funds for the institute, and he fell in love with the city. He bought a ticket for a performance of the German opera Lohengrin. Without thinking, he sat down, only to be moved along when his black face offended a white man and his date. Ironically, the white man turned out to be the other John. The humiliation of being thrown out convinced the black John that he had better go home to Georgia. He took the train back.

Everyone back home was excited and went to great efforts to prepare for the black John’s return. He had been gone for seven years. His mother and sister were there to greet him along with everyone else. He was short with them—stunned, perhaps, by the smallness and shabbiness of the town—and his coldness shocked them. The African Americans thought he seemed unhappy, but the whites thought he had become uppity.

That night, John’s restraint and coldness were such that Baptist minister who gave a sermon in his honor “got so mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant” (96). When John gave his response to the sermon, he spoke about the need for African Americans to leave behind their provincialism and to aim for something higher. It wasn’t until an old man took to the pulpit to denounce him that John realized “that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred” (96). His sister Jennie followed him when he left the church, and when she asked whether education made one unhappy, he could only say yes but that he was glad to have it.

The next day, John went to the judge’s house to ask permission to open a black school. The judge gave John a long talk about the subordinate place of African Americans and swore that he would lynch every black person in the country before he would let blacks rule over whites. John could only have the school if he agreed to teach his students what their subservient place in the natural order. John reluctantly agreed.

When the white John came home a month later, everyone was joyous, though the judge had been made uneasy by his son’s desire to go to New York and his contempt for Altamaha. The judge dreamed his son would become mayor, maybe even the governor of Georgia one day. During their arguments about the future, the judge was distracted by the postmaster’s gossip about what the other John was teaching at the black school: ideas about the French Revolution and equality. The judge stormed into the school, interrupted the lessons, and shut it down.

Back home, the white John had grown restless. He took off toward the woods, where he happened upon Jennie, John Jones’s sister. “Well, I declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid!” he said (165). He chased her into the woods and began to assault her. The black John, on his way home to break the news about losing the school, came upon them. He struck the white John with a tree branch, killing him. He walked home to tell his mother that he was leaving, but he first headed back to the stump, where he found nothing but blood stains. He hummed one of the songs from Lohengrin. That was where the lynch mob found him. He pitied them, and he pitied himself as they seized him.

Du Bois prefaces this final chapter with verses from the “Lay Dis Body Down,” a Negro spiritual. In the introduction, Du Bois explains that he has placed epigraphs that echo “the Sorrow Songs” (99)—the “songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men” (100)—alongside snippets of Anglo-American poetry at the head of every chapter (some editions of the text include the bars of music, while others do not). Hated and ignored, this music nonetheless “stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (100). It is the “gift” the African American has given to the nation.

Before the Civil War, the songs were almost forgotten or else became part of popular culture in adulterated forms as minstrel songs. During the war, Northerners heard the primitive sea islanders on Hilton Head sing the songs and did what they could to document and save them. This effort mostly failed until the Jubilee Fisk Singers went on the road to raise funds for their university. The singers took the songs across America and into Europe, “[singing] the slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that it can never wholly forget them again” (100). The true African-American folk song still lives on today.

These songs are a rare testimony to the hopes and difficulties of the African and African-American slave. The music and melodies are older than the words, however. Du Bois remembers very clearly the words of a song his great-great-grandmother, kidnapped into slavery by a Dutch trader, used to sing. The lyrics were in an African language and passed down through the generations, although no one knew what the words meant.

There are 10 master songs, and each testifies to some part of African identity that enslaved people brought with them. Du Bois lists each of the songs, then classifies them into two categories: the more authentic and primitive songs, and the more recent and less primitive. These latter songs are African American; there is an even more recent kind of folk song that is a blend of African and African-American musical heritage. In a third progression in this music, the songs are blends of African-American music and white American music. Finally, there is a genre of music that is white but influenced by African-American folk music. These songs include gospel hymns, minstrel songs, and “coon songs” (102).

Du Bois reiterates that the original words of the sorrow songs have been lost, although an African place name will pop up occasionally. These are sad songs about an exiled people. The lyrics in the songs are full of natural imagery, a reflection of the vividness of the natural world to slaves as they worked in the weather. These are also songs of longing for something better.

The songs also contain “eloquent omissions and silences” (103). There are songs about mothers and their children, but none about fathers. There are songs about tired fugitives, but few about love and courtship, and those are either very light in tone or deeply tragic. There are songs about orphans. There are plenty of songs about death. If one looks closely at some songs, one can see how the African-American singers took and transformed words from the Bible to suit the melody. In almost every song, however, there is a clinging to hope, “a faith in the ultimate justice of things” (104). Du Bois wonders whether this hope will be borne out.

After all these years, African Americans have still only found peace in worship. Du Bois wonders how a country that has taken so much from them can dare to continue denying them. African Americans have given America the gifts of song, labor, and spirituality. These gifts are the things that make the country just as much theirs. If there really is a such thing as justice and if there is a God, Du Bois asserts, then African Americans will one day receive their due.

Du Bois prays to “God the Reader” (105) that he will let Du Bois’s book not fall on deaf ears, that the guilty will hear the condemnation, and that the righteous but oppressed will hear themselves vindicated in the book. He prays for the day when every terrible thing in the book will cease to be true.