The Souls of Black Folk
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Herein is Written
The Forethought
I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom
III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
IV. Of the Meaning of Progress
V. Of the Wings of Atalanta
VI. Of the Training of Black Men
VII. Of the Black Belt
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man
X. Of the Faith of the Fathers
XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born
XII. Of Alexander Crummell
XIII. Of the Coming of John
XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs
The Afterthought
To
Burghardt and Yolande
The Lost and the Found
The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth
Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader;
for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color
line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my
words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and
passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the
spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and
strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have
pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized
candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day.
Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two
worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of
the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the
present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the
white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All
this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a
chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other
guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered
and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly,
The World’s Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter,
as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting
melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in
the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone
of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?
W.E.B. Du B.
Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.
I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make
your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question,
How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one
who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in
Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something
put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was
merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it
peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast
veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest
when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all
their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should
not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just
how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the
sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth
shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted
itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger
in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us
all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow,
tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. 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.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too
much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul
in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
message for the world. 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.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in
America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of
double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one
hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for
a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh
and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder
souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and
doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking
false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro
for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root
of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his
tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At
last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival
of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In
vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests
upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the
unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly
people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a