The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois’s major purpose in writing The Souls of Black Folk is to make the case for seeing African Americans as central to the promise of America and to intervene in the widespread representation of African Americans as passive, inferior, and dangerous. He takes several approaches to this task, including historical and sociological analysis and as literary experimentation.

Du Bois is attentive to the enduring impact of slavery on African-American character, economic status, and prosperity. A popular narrative was that African Americans still occupied low rungs of society (despite having gained freedom) because of poor character and innate inferiority. Du Bois tells a different story, painting African Americans as a people who have an enduring love of freedom but who have been stymied by the failure of the government to adequately facilitate a transition to a completely new way of life.

Du Bois uses the idea of double-consciousness to represent the struggle African Americans have faced in a land that refuses to give them full citizenship rights. Du Bois presents this central internal conflict of the African American as an undesirable and dangerous state of affairs that threatens to undo the race and the nation. However, he also represents this struggle as heroic. The impact of segregation on the identities of both blacks and whites is another important sociological condition that explains the lack of social progress for African Americans as a whole.

Du Bois uses the concept of the “Talented Tenth” (43), people who have advanced degrees and are relatively affluent, to show that given even the smallest opportunities, African Americans are just as capable of advancing as any other group. The majority of African Americans who do not progress are held down by social forces beyond their control, whether the enduring impact of slavery or persistent inequality.

Du Bois also uses anecdotes, spiritual biography, fiction, music, and autobiographical writing to represent the complexity of African-American identity. He includes an anecdote about a talented but ultimately doomed striver named Josie to show that African Americans have the same hopes and dreams as others but are often prevented from making good on those dreams. People like Alexander Crummell have a spiritual calling that is undercut by the forces of racism and poverty, and people like the fictional but realistically portrayed John Jones are stymied by racial violence. African-American spirituals show that African Americans, even during the days of slavery, have always had their own rich artistic traditions, cultures, and philosophies.

Du Bois is erudite, poetic, and intellectual. His skill as a writer and his autobiographical representation exemplifies that African Americans can contribute to American society if given the opportunity. His raw and emotional voice in “The Passing of the Firstborn” is sincere and strategic: Readers are forced to see both the universality and the specificity of black experience as they witness a father grieving while also grappling with the idea that his son’s death is a kind of perverse blessing in a world where racism still destroys the spirits of black men and black boys.

One of the threads to which Du Bois returns throughout the book is whether African Americans will be a people who value intangibles such as faith and goodness or if they will, like the rest of the South and America as a whole, sell out for the sake of material prosperity.

Du Bois’s interest in this question is in part a reflection of his opposition to the policies of educator and race leader Booker T. Washington, whose “Atlanta Compromise” speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition established a paradigm whereby African Americans would stop pushing for full civil rights in exchange for a place in the South as the labor force for the modernization of the region. Du Bois argues throughout the book that the deal is bad because it forecloses all possibility of progress when it comes to education, citizenship, and economic status. Even worse, from Du Bois’s perspective, is that such a compromise would cause a psychological death from which African American’s dignity—he calls it manhood—would never recover because it hinges on accepting the idea of innate inferiority.

Du Bois’s believes materialism is the principle that allowed slavery to exist for hundreds of years despite the avowed Christianity of Southerners and the United States. Materialism also allowed industrialists to objectify laborers, positioning them as things that did not deserve a living wage, decent housing, or social mobility.

Du Bois presents African-American spirituality as a source of resilience and leadership in “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” of creativity and artistry in “Of the Sorrow Songs,” and of protection against unchecked capitalism and modernization in “Of the Wings of Atalanta” and “Of the Meaning of Progress.” Finally, Du Bois argues that African-American spirituality, especially that of southern African Americans and those closely connected to the black Christianity of the 19th century, is part of what makes African Americans unique in America. He sees the loss of this special form of spirituality as a loss for American society as a whole.