The Souls of Black Folk

Du Bois opens the chapter by comparing cotton to the golden fleece that Jason and the Argonauts chased after to secure Jason’s throne. In the South, despite the end of slavery, cotton is still the source of wealth and power. Although African Americans are oppressed, they play a crucial role in the production of wealth.

Du Bois then offers a survey of the lives of the African American labor force, focusing on those who live in Dougherty County, Georgia. They are overburdened with debt. Their housing is a good indicator of their place in society: They live in the same slave cabins as their ancestors or in cabins built on the ruins of the old. These shabby cabins are clustered around the big house. Large families are packed into one room. Landowners have yet to realize that better housing would make better workers, and they never think to give better quarters to their workers because they are black. Accustomed to having little, the workers—mostly desperate tenants who will never strike out on their own—accept these conditions.

The families in the houses include young married couples and many babies. The poor economic situation leads most young people to forgo marriage, leading, Du Bois speculates, to sexual immorality. The women are by no means morally loose; the problem is that people form and break marriage bonds frequently. Du Bois traces the high rate of divorce and separation back to slavery, when masters gave slaves leave to take up with each other but then broke up marriages when it was in their interest to sell one of the partners. The black church stepped in to perform binding marriages, but the fragility of marital bonds persists.

In terms of character, the people are well-to-do and steady workers or else “lewd and vicious” (57). Most are poor and ignorant but honest enough. They live in a culture of poverty that isolates them from the wider world and lack basic knowledge about civics and the economy (another legacy of slavery). As ignorant as they are, they long for something else. They are not lazy. They work harder and for less than any other people. Most of the men are farmers and laborers, and most of the women are laborers and servants. There is no leisure or recreation.

The land is fertile enough to grow all kinds of crops throughout the year, but most of the land is planted in cotton and laborers are in debt for the cost of seed and farming tools. In fact, sharecropping has made a mockery of emancipation because debt still binds the people to a landowner. When the price of cotton fell, more owners became absentee landlords, allowing farms to devolve into ruin and trapping sharecroppers in poverty.

Now, the African-American tenant turns to the merchant, who advances seed, food, and supplies in exchange for a mortgage on the crops, livestock, and equipment. The merchant exercises tight control; once he has sold it and taken what he is owed on the mortgage, there is almost always nothing left—some even end up deeper in debt. It is an endless cycle. Even worse, landlords demand that their rent be paid in cotton, preventing tenants from diversifying his crops.

A system in which most black families are in debt is “radically wrong” (60), argues Du Bois. He blames this system in part on the nation, which emancipated slaves but gave them nothing with which to begin a free life. He places most of the blame, however, on “the widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work” (60). Du Bois admits that like “all ground-down peasantries” (60), regardless of race or national origin, black laborers are not particularly efficient or focused in their work. The result is crime and class envy. Ambitious African Americans buy their own land or move to town as soon as possible.

Across the rural Black Belt, most laborers receive so little pay that they are all but slaves, and the legal system conspires to return workers to former plantations, with no complaint from the whites who elect the sheriffs. In some cases, African Americans are falsely accused and convicted of crimes and then made to work out their punishment as unpaid labor. Freedom is also limited by an insidious system of patronage whereby the character of any black person must be vouched for by a white person. Unknown African Americans are harassed or subject to arrest if no white person will vouch for them.

African Americans group together or move to towns to escape the deeper oppression of the countryside, despite the poor wages. While older African Americans may blame laziness for the failure of their people to thrive, to buy land, and become owners, Du Bois says the sociological reality is that nothing in the experience of black laborers encourages initiative, care, or working to get ahead. People have no incentive to practice these habits when those who do end up go nowhere. Whites tell outsiders that the failure of the black laborer to advance is a result of character flaws, not the system.

“Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a starting-point,” Du Bois writes, “let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is” (62). Du Bois outlines the class structure among African Americans in Dougherty County, Georgia. The bottom 10th has nothing but their labor with neither capital nor wages as a result. Just above them are sharecroppers, who make up the largest portion. They never get ahead because their landlords raise the rents to match any increase in the price of cotton. Above sharecroppers are laborers who receive money or goods for their work. They are mostly young and unmarried, and they slip down a level once they do marry. About 5% of the population consists of renters who have fixed rental costs, allowing them to diversify their crops. They are generally hard workers and financially shrewd; they tend to either sink to the lower levels or move up to become landowners. From 1875 to 1900, this class tripled in terms of the assessed value of lands held. Economic recessions and swings in the price of cotton make for a lot of mobility in and out of this class, however, so their real numbers are hard to measure.  

Starting with so little, just a few African Americans have managed to become landowners. The major trend, in the face of such a steep uphill battle, is to buy homesteads near town or, in the case of laborers, to give up on the country altogether and move to town.

Looking back over the history of encounters between European powers and people of color, Du Bois concludes that the result has usually been the triumph of brute force over the weak and the innocent, no matter how much people insist otherwise. In the 20th century, it is the duty of all right-thinking people to make sure that we move away from Darwinian struggle and toward the triumph of goodness. That end can only be reached with an objective, sociological study of contact between the races. There is no more ideal place for this study than the South.

Du Bois wonders what the state of race relations really is in the South. He notes that contacts occur in terms of where people live and how they group themselves into communities, via economic relations, politically, through the exchange of ideas, through everyday social contacts, and via religion.

How whites and blacks are segregated in terms of their neighborhoods varies, but it is almost always true that such arrangements prevent the mingling of the best of the respective races. This is a stark change from the past when slave masters and house slaves had close contact with each other in the homes of the masters, and the masters never saw the squalid conditions allotted to field hands.

The ways in which blacks and whites interact regularly are often overlooked. Many people assume that establishing satisfactory economic relations is just a matter of educating a cooperative black race for jobs in industry and agriculture, but the truth is that very little in the experience of African Americans has prepared them for this approach to work.

The lack of experience is the result of 200-plus years of slavery. With few resources at the start of their freedom, African Americans have been left to compete with modern workers. When slavery ended, the economic organization of the South did not return to what it was before the war, when planters held the power. Instead, power went to “the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants” (68). Driven purely by profit, these economic masters exploit workers, both black and white, who are yet unable to compete in the new economy.

Such a lopsided system breeds hatred, and the legal system designed to maintain and regulate debt exacerbates problems or covers over explicit fraud against striving African Americans. Only time will erase the race hatred that breeds such an economic system, so it will be up to African Americans to create their own leaders to help them survive and thrive.

Another form of racial contact is political. When African Americans gained suffrage, the nation washed its hands of serving as guardians of the newly freed slaves. The period of government that followed was one that was rotten with corruption; serving in government came to be a path that no respectable person—and most certainly not a respectable black person—would follow. In this vacuum, the civil rights of African Americans were steadily stripped. Moreover, voting itself came to be seen as disreputable.

The efforts of African Americans to improve their lot are doomed if the strivers are discouraged or prevented from voting and the worst sort of whites are enabled to turn the law into an instrument of abuse. Black crime, which had supposedly increased since emancipation, is the direct result of the treatment of any infraction as criminal as well as an unfair political system that supports the essential re-enslavement of blacks. Good, well-funded public schools are needed end this terrible trend.

The next form of contact—the exchange of ideas—is less tangible and therefore harder to describe. The “storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced” (73) has been raging for a generation since the freeing of the slaves. The generation born of the ex-slaves is at the center of this storm, but there is almost a “conspiracy of silence” (73) around talking about their lot publicly. The outsider can only see the truth of the matter (that there are two worlds running alongside each other) by looking carefully or by pure chance. Despite the frequent physical contact between these worlds, there is almost no means by which these worlds exchange ideas or information. The libraries, public events, and public spaces where such exchanges could happen are segregated or forbidden to African Americans. The educated white person and the educated black person see only the worst of each other, undermining many philanthropic projects.

The final form of contact is social. During the days of slavery, masters and their servants had some contact, but Jim Crow’s hardening of the racial divide has made such contacts virtually disappear. Social contact—eating or drinking together—is unheard of except in low places like brothels, although white generosity to the poor is accepted.

Du Bois contends that Southerners, deep down inside, are keenly aware that the status of African Americans is not in step with their purported Christianity and their belief in American freedom. All too often, their response is to claim that the separation is not a matter of color prejudice. African Americans, they believe, are criminal and lazy by nature, and they see all African Americans, regardless of class or character, through the lens of this stereotype.

If things are to improve, the better class of African Americans most commit to uplifting those beneath them in terms of class and character, and whites must admit the impact of oppression and history on the current condition of African Americans. If both groups open their eyes to the true state of affairs, there is some hope that the South can fulfill the promise of America.

Du Bois recalls the intense experience of watching a woman receive the Holy Ghost at a black religious revival. From the outside, such intense religious experiences may look odd or even ridiculous, but they are an expression of the sincere religiosity of African Americans. These expressions of faith have their roots in the culture the slaves made, characterized by the presence of “the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy” (76).

Black religious life was the one means by which enslaved people expressed their worldview and ideas about life, so it is worth studying it from a sociological perspective. Black adherents of New World faiths have left their mark on American religion as well, not least in their music. Learning more about black spirituality will shed some light on the modern forms of these faiths.

The modern African-American church is the center of black life in rural communities and is “the most characteristic expression of African character” (77). Aside from religious services, the typical black church is a community meeting place with charities, social clubs, mutual aid societies, welcome wagons, and paths to employment. The church is also “a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final authority on what is Good and Right” (77-78).

What African Americans are denied by the color line is found in the church and “the bishops who preside over these organizations throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the world. Such churches are really governments of men” (78). Given this influence, it is no wonder that almost all African Americans are church members or at least regularly participate in activities at the church.

The black church has its roots in Africa, where the power was in the chief, the priest oversaw worship of nature, and the social organization was polygamous and based on kinship between clan members. Plantation life in the Caribbean and the Americas changed all this. The master exercised power, and a new polygamy—one ordered for the benefit of the master’s profit and that broke all bonds of kinship—took hold. The priest became the medicine man, “healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people” (78). Eventually, the medicine man morphed into the preacher, who oversaw a faith that only became fully Christian after generations of slavery.

The church over which the preacher presided was almost always Baptist or Methodist, and it predated the monogamous household as the first black social institution. Worshipers had limited freedom of movement, which made the black church democratic in nature in order to accommodate the separation between slaves on different plantations. After emancipation, most black churches separated from white churches of the same denomination, especially in the North.

The church has much to tell us about the “inner ethical life” of African Americans, according to Du Bois. When the African slave arrived in the New World, slavery “was to him the dark triumph of Evil over him” (79). Despite his marshaling of all the rites and practices that he had brought with him, he remained powerless to free himself from the master. Abetted by the masters, who liked the idea of people who accepted their humble place, African Americans were ripe for a Christianity that preached redemption in the next world but not this one. “[A] religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime” (80), argues Du Bois. The bad habits of the race have their roots in this period, Du Bois believes.

Before the Civil War, black freedmen used the church to support abolition, and among these people, Du Bois believes, one can find the “the ethical and social leader[s]” (80) of the race. The faith of such leaders was intense and tended to emphasize the judgment coming to those who enslaved African Americans. Freedom through the abolition was at the center of the black church. When it finally came, African Americans saw their emancipation as “a literal Coming of the Lord” (80). Freedom was something that happened to the African American, not something he had done. This freedom was followed by the post-Reconstruction period, or the “Age of Reaction” (80), and African Americans did not know how to respond.

Today, African Americans’ entire lives are consumed by the “Negro problem.” At the same time, they must contend with the fast pace of modernization like everyone else. This “double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism” (81), Du Bois believes.

In the South, Du Bois contends, African Americans have chosen hypocrisy: “Black youth in the South is forced into moral cowardice and slyness. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage” (82) for the sake of having any economic opportunity. This is true for all oppressed people, in fact.

In the North, African Americans have access to ideas that feed them intellectually, but limited economic opportunities and discrimination make them bitter and angry. Some form their own exclusive societies, while others sink into debauched lives. Du Bois observes that most Northern African Americans “despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters” (82).

In such contexts, the black church is becoming increasingly like the white church—a source of entertainment or social status, cold, all about appearances, but the “real Negro heart” (82) is still in there somewhere.