The Souls of Black Folk

Du Bois begins the chapter with a lyrical description of the city of Atlanta and proposes that before the Civil War Atlanta was a kind of backwater, but it has been transformed. The city’s destruction during the war left a certain sullenness in some of the people of Atlanta. Other more enterprising and materialistic people built factories and turned their hands to making money.

Du Bois reminds the reader that the name of the city sounds like that of the Greek virgin-huntress Atalanta, who was forced to wed after she lost a foot race with a suitor who slowed her down by strewing her path with golden apples. Like Atalanta, the city has lost sight of the important things and is instead obsessed with material things. This is a growing American disease, one that the city can still avoid. This confusion about the proper aims of life has corrupted almost every corner of Southern culture. People even think that the aim of public schools, politics, and programs to uplift African Americans is to procure wealth instead of “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” (33). The life of African Americans, which Du Bois describes as taking place within a veil, is hidden and hardly considered by the larger world, but it is not immune to the spirit of the times.

Du Bois lives in the hills of Atlanta as a professor at Atlanta University, where the sons of former slaves learn the liberal arts, a noble store of knowledge and values that are as ancient as the Pharaohs. Du Bois’s students strive for “the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice” (34). The university is a “green oasis” (34) in a desert of racial hatred.

Nevertheless, Atlanta University and the other universities African Americans hastily created after gaining freedom sit upon a poor foundation. They are high schools, not colleges. Their founders underestimated the time it would take for their people to achieve their dreams. They fail to consider that not everyone is college material and that education must therefore consider individual abilities. “The function of the university,” says Du Bois, “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” (34). Atlanta and the South can make all the money in the world, but what is really needed is a broad, generous culture, and only the university can provide this, thus allowing an escape from the dangers of materialism.

Weakened by slavery and elitism, the South’s higher education system failed to thrive before the war. Now, Du Bois argues, is the time to build Southern universities for both blacks and whites that are capable of seeding the South with a “few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability” (35) to end the strife between the races.

All forms of education, from kindergarten to the industrial school, rely on the university, in the end. The choice between a liberal arts education or a vocational education is a false one. African Americans need both, and people must receive training according to their abilities. All people, however, can benefit from an education that teaches strong values like the importance of truth for its own sake.

Du Bois notes that the world is globalizing, a process that began with slavery in the New World. Three streams of thoughts and afterthoughts originated as a result. The first thought was that international trade could satisfy the needs of all countries, and the first afterthought was imperialism. The second thought was that the slave was neither man nor beast, and the afterthought was that although some few might become men, everything should be done to prevent this happening. The third thought was that of the objectified slave, who cried out for freedom, and the third afterthought was also the slave’s, who feared that maybe he was indeed the thing the South had made him.

The way forward through these contending thoughts and afterthoughts is engrossing but fraught with danger. The country, and the South specifically, have in their hands a captive workforce that will be wasted if it is not educated, leading the whole country to “national decadence” (37). Only education can lead the South away from its racial prejudice and lead African Americans away from a future in which the futility of striving leads them to waste and laziness. While in the past education was only for the elite, today some of the lowly but talented have access to education. The South is made up of backward black and white people, however, and liberalization is hard to apply broadly as a result.

Du Bois reviews the history of Southern education to see whether he can find some clues to what education must become in the context of the South. From the war until Reconstruction, Southern education was dispersed among missionary schools, Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and army schools. By 1876, a complete school system including black colleges and teacher training schools had been built, but there was no long-term strategy to educate former slaves and their descendants. From 1885, the path forward became muddled. The South industrialized, and African Americans contended with increasingly restrictive laws that limited work options and made people wonder what the point of education was in the face of such oppression.

The industrial schools founded in 1895 were supposed to answer this question. Industrial education emphasized the dignity of work and its role as the precursor to knowledge. Du Bois fears, however, that race prejudice and imperialism have made some see people, particularly black people, as sources of labor only and the highest aim of education as preparing the labor force. Some have argued that efforts to educate African Americans occurred all out of order—education to teach the value of work should have been followed by common schools to teach literacy, and only then should secondary and postsecondary education have been the focus.

Du Bois dismisses this criticism. The illiteracy of former slaves and the color-line created a situation in which teachers—and lots of them—were desperately needed. They would have to be black teachers because the segregated South would never allow whites to educate blacks. No matter how backward the development of African-American education, it produced tens of thousands of teachers, wiped out high rates of illiteracy, and created the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers (now Tuskegee University). The secondary and postsecondary institutions that emerged aimed to create teacher trainers capable of meeting the needs of African Americans. They had to be “be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself” (39).

Du Bois acknowledges that some question this aim, including whites who suspect that a classical education is beyond the needs and ability of African Americans. Putting aside simple prejudice, skeptics raise legitimate questions. What happens if a classical education teaches African Americans to be discontent with their limited lot in life? Do graduates of black colleges and high schools really know the material, and do they succeed after graduation? Du Bois’s response is, in part, that we should ask these questions of all institutions of higher learning, not just black ones. He argues that among all colleges, some are little more than high schools.

Du Bois then examines the 34 institutions that he believes can legitimately be called colleges. Some of these colleges were founded by generous whites from New England. Du Bois estimates that these colleges have produced 2,000 African American graduates, a number that puts to rest the argument that there is too much focus on higher education.

About 500 African Americans have graduated from elite, historically white universities, bringing the total of black college graduates to around 2,500. In 1900, Atlanta University surveyed these graduates. Of the two-thirds who responded to the survey, more than half work as teachers, 17% are clergymen, 17% are in the professions, and the remainder are in ordinary work or government service. Du Bois declares that “this is a record of usefulness” (40).

Moreover, based on Du Bois’s own experience, African-American college graduates are not as arrogant as most people with a university education; their rugged early roots prevent this. They are dedicated, mostly avoid any sort of political agitation, and make up much of the workforce that meets the educational, medical, and spiritual needs of their people.

At the same time, because the South is still committed to segregation and the raw wounds of the war and its aftermath are so recent, higher education for African Americans must be approached with great delicacy. Even whites who see the progress of the South in a positive light may believe higher education is wasted on African Americans because it makes them discontent. Du Bois contends that these people are foolish and shortsighted. An ignorant race is more likely to be vulnerable to demagogues who will lead them into unrest. Moreover, a small cohort of African Americans—the “Talented Tenth” (43)— will never be content as manual labors. Failing to educate them is asking for trouble. Beyond this, the energy and resources the South expends in oppressing African Americans is a waste that cannot continue without end. As African Americans grow and work, they are keenly conscious of all the wrongs and racial stereotypes foisted on them, and they will not accept these conditions permanently. If the nation and the South want to avoid a disaster, we must provide African Americans with a broad education.

According to Du Bois, “The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men” (44). Du Bois closes with the thought that because of his education, he sits with the great men of Western culture, and not one begrudges him this company because of the color line. The South would do well to follow their lead.