Summary of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

Description

W.E.B. Du Bois was a unique figure in his day. He was a well-traveled writer and thinker with a superb education, culminating with the first-ever doctorate a black American earned at Harvard. From his early life, he devoted himself to addressing the challenges of black people in America. In 1903, he combined several magazine articles and a short story into this anthology. At times serious and at other times lyrical, he strove to educate audiences about the special experience of black people in America and their contributions to American culture and life. More than a century later, it is fascinating how prescient Du Bois was in his analysis and how many of his observations, troublingly, still ring true today. [Editor’s note: Du Bois wrote in 1903, using the vocabulary of his time.]

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Sujets

• Classics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: GetAbstract AG
• Date de parution: 26 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798887270975
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois•First edition: Chicago 1903

Sociology
Realism

Take-Aways The Souls of Black Folk is among the most influential works on the African-American experience ever written. This collection, consisting of 14 primarily non-fiction essays, portrays the life of black people in the United States after Emancipation. Topics include their hopes and striving, their songs and religion, but also abject poverty, debt bondage, disenfranchisement and violent racism. W.E.B. Du Bois wanted to provide a glimpse into life behind the “Veil,” a thick, invisible layer separating black people from white people. Published in 1903, the book’s title was programmatic: Some white Americans in that era thought of black people as less than human. Eight years earlier, Booker T. Washington had argued for economic independence rather than social equality as the primary goal for black people. In 1899, Du Bois was in Atlanta when a black farmhand, who was unjustly accused of rape, was brutally lynched nearby. A month later, when Du Bois was unable to find a black doctor, his two-year-old son died. After those experiences, he decided that there was no point in detached, scholarly work on the subject of race. Instead, he wrote in a very personal, at times polemical, but mostly very lyrical style. Henry James and Martin Luther King Jr. admired Du Bois, and his book became a manifesto for the civil rights movement. “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

What It’s About
W.E.B. Du Bois was a unique figure in his day. He was a well-traveled writer and thinker with a superb education, culminating with the first-ever doctorate a black American earned at Harvard. From his early life, he devoted himself to addressing the challenges of black people in America. In 1903, he combined several magazine articles and a short story into this anthology. At times serious and at other times lyrical, he strove to educate audiences about the special experience of black people in America and their contributions to American culture and life. More than a century later, it is fascinating how prescient Du Bois was in his analysis and how many of his observations, troublingly, still ring true today. [ Editor’s note: Du Bois wrote in 1903, using the vocabulary of his time. ]

Summary
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”
Being black in America meant being a problem: It was called the “Negro problem,” and no one could turn a blind eye to it. Black people were destined to have a double consciousness, perpetually looking at themselves through the eyes of others. They are Americans, and they are black – two identities at odds with one another, separated by the inescapable “Veil.” Crippled by a centuries-old legacy of slavery, ignorance, poverty and humiliation, black Americans were thrust into the supposed promised land of freedom without a cent, a home, land, skills or savings.
“Of the Dawn of Freedom”
This is not what was intended. In 1865, just two years after Emancipation, the federal government founded the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its mission would have been daunting in the best of times, let alone in the post-Civil War period of economic hardship and racial bigotry: What to do with millions of internal refugees, suddenly in need of food, shelter, clothing and jobs? So the Bureau went to work, fighting off mass starvation, building hospitals, establishing courts and last, but not least, trying to provide land to ex-slaves on abandoned properties in the South.
While the Bureau succeeded in some endeavors, chiefly in education, it failed in most. Peonage and forced labor, though forbidden by law, were effectively becoming the law of the land. Then, seven years into its existence, the Bureau was abolished. One argument was that in 1870 the 15th amendment had given black people the right to vote. Yet in practice, not a single Southern legislature was willing to admit blacks to the polls.