The Souls of Black Folk
Herein W. E. B. Du Bois sketches the spiritual world of ten thousand thousand black Americans striving at the dawn of the twentieth century. Across fourteen essays, he traces what Emancipation meant and the disappointment that followed, the slow rise of black leadership, and his candid critique of Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. He carries the reader within the Veil that separates black life from white, studying the struggles of the black peasantry of the rural South, the strained relations of master's and servant's sons, and the religion, sorrow, and aspiration of a people. He closes with the death of his infant son and a chapter on the Sorrow Songs.
The book gives us "double-consciousness," the sense of always seeing oneself through others' eyes, and declares that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Blending history, sociology, autobiography, and lyric prose, Du Bois insists on the full humanity and intellectual life of black Americans. It remains a founding text of African American literature and a profound meditation on race, identity, and freedom.
How it begins
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.