By W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), this was first published in 1903. W.E.B. stands for William Edward Burghardt. He was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, and he gained an international reputation as a sociologist, historian, activist, educator, and writer.

I feel I should have read this book a long time ago. Indeed, I wanted to read it a long time ago. There was a point in our lives when Nigel frequently travelled to the United States for work, and I used to give him lists of the American literature I wanted to acquire (in the Barnes and Noble cheap editions, because the exchange rate wasn't at all favourable to New Zealanders at that point). Bit by bit, I book-wormed my way through work by Kate Chopin, Sinclair Lewis, O. Henry, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Jack London. But there was one I was always requesting that he could never find: This one.

Fast forward two decades, and of course, not only is much more available on line but also I'm much more geared up to locating books that way. My free electronic version of The Souls of Black Folk had its beginnings in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library of Cambridge Massachusetts...


Nevada. This state banned the practice of slavery twice, but "was no racial utopia"

The book is a collection of 14 pieces (plus a "forethought" and an "after-thought"). Only one is a fictional story. The rest are essays, which draw on a broad range of economic, sociological, political, biographical, and autobiographical material. Each of the substantive chapters is headed by a quotation and a snatch of musical notation. Most of these are from a "Sorrow Song", or what we would term a spiritual -- the outpourings that constitute "the articulate message of the slave to world".

Du Bois's goal is to "show the strange meaning of being black here [in the United States] at the dawning of the Twentieth Century". In his introduction, he states flatly: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." He doesn't just mean his own country. He traces this colour-line right across the globe.

He starts by explaining, at the beginning of the first chapter, that behind all the specific questions posed by white to black lurks one that's always unspoken: "How does it feel to be a problem?"

He continues: "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 two-ness -- an American, a Negro [this terminology was current at the time, and considered an advance on previous epithets]; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Black people, he insists, just want to be both black and American, without encountering hostility or the denial of opportunity.

But between the black person and opportunity, there is always "the Veil". He describes, for example, his first school posting: "I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner's house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and the water jingled, and we rode on. 'Come in,' said the commissioner. "Come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?' 'Oh,' thought I, 'this is lucky'; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I -- alone."

Colour-line, double-consciousness, the Veil... These key concepts will be developed throughout the book.


Nevada voters will decide next year "whether to get rid of slavery and involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment from the state constitution... That language in more than a dozen state constitutions is one of the lasting legacies of chattel slavery in the U.S., and the loophole gave way to other racist measures post-Civil War"

Four things struck me as I read:

1.
The whole work is really beautifully written. Du Bois is a master of the elegant sentence, and this talent shines forth whether he's walking you through a rational argument, or capturing the pathos and atmosphere of an everyday scene.

2.
I was somewhat appalled by how little I knew... I hadn't realized, for example, what a botched business emancipation was, and how it set up a chain of disappointments. As with so many political acts, there seems to have been a complete failure to look ahead, assess consequences, and make provisions. Slaves had looked to the outlawing of slavery to right all wrongs. But, at the time Du Bois is writing, 40 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and "the Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land."

The result of emancipation was that millions of people had "suddenly, violently ... come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters". It was another two years before the Freedmen's Bureau was established, with the mandate to deal with newly emancipated slaves, refugees, and abandoned lands. Its success was mixed, according to Du Bois: "This Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land."

With emancipation per se clearly not the silver bullet to "a promised land of sweeter beauty", people began to look to the ballot to fulfil that role. The 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, gave African American men the right to vote (and spelled the end of the Freedmen's Bureau -- ill advisedly, in Du Bois's view). But again, as many other parts of the world have discovered, the right to vote does not make you truly free: "For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary."

Education was also considered a potential route out of inequality. Yet several chapters in The Souls of Black Folk detail the problems inherent in the system of schooling and training as experienced by black students: "We daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black."

The chapter entitled Of the Black Belt offers a portrait of Georgia. It is a particularly beautiful, evocative, and melancholy chapter, full of profoundly affecting human stories. Debt, disappointment, despondency, and decay hang heavy over everything -- not to mention rampant injustice. A man in rags tells Du Bois about a cheating landowner: "'I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never cashed them -- kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture.' 'Furniture?' I asked; 'but furniture is exempt from seizure by law.' 'Well, he took it just the same,' said the hard-faced man..."

The theme of injustice is taken up again in the next chapter, which focuses on Georgia's cotton country: "A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems to independent or 'sassy,' he may be arrested or summarily driven away." And land-ownership is for most an impossible dream: "Only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship... Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom."


According to Abolish Slavery, five American states still force incarcerated people to work for no pay...

3.
There is a universal applicability to much of The Souls of Black Folk. For example, the chapter on Booker T. Washington, an African American educator and adviser, with whose principles Du Bois found himself radically at odds, reminds me of other diverging routes to progress in other situations. I nodded along with Du Bois. Yet my own predilection for compromise, and aversion to conflict, might surely have put me in Washington's camp... The biographical sketch of Alexander Crummell, who overcame hate, despair, and doubt to become an Episcopal priest and educator, also has -- fortunately -- counterparts in other places. Of the Coming of John, as the collection's only piece of fiction is entitled, is a searing tale of prejudice and double standards that again could have been replicated in any number of colonial settings.

In the chapter entitled Of the Passing of the First-Born, Du Bois offers us a moving, intensely personal reflection on the death of his own first child. He rejoices in the birth, of course. But he is also aware of the context of this new life: "In the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live -- a Negro and a Negro's son." His son dies very young. Du Bois grieves, of course. But he also finds himself tempted to see the boy's death as an escape from what his child would have had to endure had he lived:

"Blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil -- and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, 'Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.' No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood... Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we -- aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me -- I shall die in my bonds -- but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not 'Is he white?' but 'Can he work?'... Some morning this may be, long, long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou shalt forego! ... Sleep, then, child -- sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet -- above the Veil."

Again, how many people on the "wrong" side of the colour-line throughout the world might have experienced -- might be experiencing -- this tragic blend of grief, despair, resignation, and hope?



4.
The package Du Bois describes -- the colour-line, double-consciousness, the Veil -- is still with us. Which cannot be anything other than shameful... Don't trust me, a white person, as to its continued potency. NPR gathered some testimonies, including this one:

"One idea that seemed to resonate with the [reading] group was Du Bois' concept of 'double consciousness,' which describes how difficult it was to be both black and American -- at a time when being American essentially meant being white. Freshman Hadiyah Cummings says this duality can still be a struggle. 'It's definitely hard having to know I love being black and I love what I represent, and also knowing that if I want to get a job that I have to look a certain way or speak a certain way,' Cummings says. 'And so having to fight this constant battle of choosing which side of me am I going to show today and also just wanting to be able to be unapologetically me and be accepted in both spaces is definitely hard to deal with.'"

Sandra Barnes also emphasizes the way the observations and findings of Du Bois "continue to plague society today". And Don Holmes argues: "To say that we have found a solution to America’s racial divergence would be misleading when one considers our current political and social climates." He quotes Vann R. Newkirk, who wrote an introduction to the 2017 edition of The Souls of Black Folk: "It is obvious that while Du Bois now rests, his most-famous work does not... From Barack Obama’s presidency to the rise of Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump’s election amid a furor over voting rights, white nationalism, and racism, the color line is still the country’s core subject."

It's depressing, certainly.

Yet Du Bois would not have us despair. Despite the heaviness of much of this collection, its final chapter offers a note of cautious hope: "Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope -- a faith in the ultimate justice of things... If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free."

It's tempting to say Amen. But these words were written a long time ago, and just hoping is not going to crack the problem. We all need to ask ourselves what we can do to put things right -- in America and further afield.



_*_*_

Du Bois's ideas influenced a slew of writers and civil rights activists. They are also relevant -- or so Mark Sawyer argues -- to the history of black oppression in Latin America (his analysis, through the lens of Du Bois, of Rebelion, by Joe Arroyo, is fascinating).

Less widely recognized is Du Bois's contribution to international politics. Yet he was very astute in his recognition of the role played by "race" on the international as well as domestic scene. Writing in 1935 on the Ethiopian conflict, for example, he argues: "Italy has forced the world into a position where, whether or not she wins, race hate will increase, while, if she loses, the prestige of the white world will receive a check comparable to that involved in the defeat of Russia by Japan... [The moral to be drawn from Italy's attack] is that if any colored nation expects to maintain itself against white Europe it need appeal neither to religion nor culture but only to force."

Zachariah Mampilly explains how Du Bois very clearly recognized the contradiction between, on the one hand, racism and its effects on the colonized world, and on the other, the dawn of the liberal internationalist system helmed by the United States. He increasingly spoke out against colonialism -- identifying it as the catalyst for WWII, and arguing that the nascent United Nations was not standing up against the colonial system with sufficient vigour. He also recognized the scourge of neocolonialism: "The exploitation that Du Bois detailed in his report on Liberia was something of a blueprint for how, long after the end of direct colonialism, global superpowers would use debt to guarantee the subservience of countries in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world."

Of course, he had his blind spots. The Souls of Black Folk does occasionally refer to "the Jew" (companies collapse, for example, and "the Jew" falls heir)...

And in that article on Ethiopia, he remarks: "Japan is regarded by all colored peoples as their logical leader... No matter what Japan does or how she does it, excuse leaps to the lips of the colored thinkers." True at the time, maybe, and in various writings Du Bois offers valuable insight into Japan's motivations for conquest and colonization, but he didn't anticipate how quickly that positivity on the part of "colored peoples" in Asia would evaporate once they had experienced Japanese rule at first hand. Ignoring the lens of race undoubtedly makes for a distorted world view (it has long been my view that many strands of global politics are driven by unacknowledged racism). Conversely, seeing the world ONLY through that lens also pulls reality out of shape. (Reginald Kearney and Sidney Pash are well worth reading with regard to Du Bois's Japanophilia.)

His increasingly leftward turn is understandable, given his championship of the downtrodden, and the resurgence of capitalism after WWII. But his admiration for Chairman Mao and his praise for Joseph Stalin do indeed seem "inconsistent with his lifelong support for democracy".

The end is quite sad.

In 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois left the United States for Ghana, at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah: "Hounded by the US government and marginalized by the academic and policy establishments that once welcomed him, Du Bois was fleeing his homeland. It was a figurative exile that turned literal when the US State Department refused to renew his passport, rendering him functionally stateless."

He died in 1963, just one day before Martin Luther King proclaimed to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: "I have a dream".