The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk, collection of essays on Black life and race relations in the United States at the turn of the 20th century by W.E.B. Du Bois. Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a landmark of African American literature. A sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist, Du Bois was the preeminent Black American protest leader during the first half of the 20th century.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois disputed the main principle of the political program of the era’s other leading Black American spokesperson, Booker T. Washington, who argued that voting rights and civil rights were less important to Black progress than acquiring property and attaining economic self-sufficiency. Committed to a philosophy of self-help, Washington urged Black Americans to temporarily accept racial discrimination—which he believed would wither away—and lift themselves up through hard work and economic gain that he thought would win the respect of whites. Du Bois, who opened The Souls of Black Folk with the words “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” worried that Washington’s “accommodationist” philosophy would doom Black Americans to indefinite subservience to whites. “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission,” wrote Du Bois. “[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”

In an environment that he saw as suffused with virulent racism—where lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and race riots proliferated—Du Bois was convinced that social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In The Souls of Black Folk, he described what he called the “double-consciousness” of African Americans:

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

An uncompromising advocate of civil rights and voting rights, Du Bois argued that through “work, culture, and liberty” this dual heritage of African Americans could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change in the United States. Largely as a result of its quest for a synthesis of racial and national consciousness founded on “the ideal of human brotherhood,” The Souls of Black Folk ranks among the most provocative and influential works of  20th-century African American literature.