The Souls of Black Folk

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.

[Illustration]


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.