On The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk may be the most important American book of its century, and it is also one of the most beautiful. Published in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois's collection of essays is part sociology, part history, part memoir, part something closer to music, and it gave American thought a set of ideas and images that have never left it. To read it is to encounter a mind of extraordinary range insisting, at the dawn of the twentieth century, that the question of race was the question the country could not avoid.

Du Bois's most famous and most enduring idea is double consciousness, the peculiar experience, as he described it, of always seeing oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity. The Black American, he wrote, is born with a veil, gifted with second sight in this American world, a world that yields him no true self-consciousness but lets him see himself only through the revelation of the other world. He named the strain of being both American and Black in a country that treated the two as a contradiction, two souls, two warring ideals in one dark body, and the longing to be both without being cursed for either.

The phrase has traveled far beyond its origin because it named something real and durable about identity under conditions of contempt, the doubled awareness of those who must constantly see themselves as the dominant culture sees them. It is one of the genuinely original contributions of American thought, and it came from this book.

The Souls of Black Folk also contains Du Bois's careful, respectful, and firm break with Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist program, also on these shelves in Up From Slavery, urged Black Americans to focus on vocational self-improvement and economic progress while accepting, for the time, political and social subordination. Du Bois argued that this bargain conceded too much, that without the vote, without higher education, without insistence on full civil and political rights, economic progress alone would leave Black Americans permanently subordinate. He called instead for the cultivation of what he termed the Talented Tenth and for an uncompromising demand for full citizenship.

That disagreement defined a generation of argument about strategy, and reading the two books together, Du Bois and Washington, is the best way to understand the stakes. Du Bois belongs in a library of the republic because he insisted, more eloquently than anyone of his time, that the promise of American democracy was unfinished as long as it excluded the people this book speaks for, and because he wrote that insistence into prose of lasting power.

The full text is public domain and freely available. Read the opening essay for the idea of double consciousness and the meaning of the veil, and the chapter on Washington for the great strategic debate, then let the rest, including the extraordinary writing on the sorrow songs, carry you.