The Souls of Black Folk
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W. E. B. Du Bois. >> The Souls of Black Folk
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16 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
Selected Bibliography
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 Emanci-
pation, 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 tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening
and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the
terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the
disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of
friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new
watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty
demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the
Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he
had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded
as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with
which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not
votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a
power that had done all this? A million black men started
with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So
the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left
the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly
but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began
gradually to replace the dream of political power,--a pow-
erful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided,
another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the
ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory
ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters
of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to
have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer
than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged,
but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily,
doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering
feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark
pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously,
this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold
statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there,
noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some
one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever
dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim
and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal,
no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey
at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it
changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning
self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre
forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he
saw himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in
himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He
began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the
world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time
he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a
half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a
cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had
entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of
dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of
his ignorance,--not simply of letters, but of life, of business,
of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and
feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red
stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal
defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race,
meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also
the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white
adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro
home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race
with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and
thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists
gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul
of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow
of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly
explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism,
learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher"
against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is
founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness,
and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance.
But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this
he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before
that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic
humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of
fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate
disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,
--before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm
and discourage any nation save that black host to whom
"discouragement" is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering
of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an
atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents
came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and
dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is
vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism,
saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what
need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black
man's ballot, by force or fraud,--and behold the suicide of a
race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,
--the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the
clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and
the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress
to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-
sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the
burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with
doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of
the past,--physical freedom, political power, the training of
brains and the training of hands,--all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast.
Are they all wrong,--all false? No, not that, but each alone
was over-simple and incomplete,--the dreams of a credulous
race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world
which does not know and does not want to know our power.
To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded
into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more
than ever,--the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears,
and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted
minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in
sheer self-defence,--else what shall save us from a second
slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the
freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,--all these
we need, not singly but together, not successively but together,
each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that
vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of
human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of
Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and
talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals
of the American Republic, in order that some day on American
soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics
both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not
altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents
of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence
than the American Negroes; there is no true American music
but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American
fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all,
we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence
in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be
poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with
light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse
and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar
music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the
great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving
of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is
almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it
in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of
their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let
me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving
emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving
in the souls of black folk.
II
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
History's lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
'Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of
men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the
sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War;
and however much they who marched South and North in
1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and
local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we
know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause
of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question
ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer.
No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than
this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,--What
shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands
this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation
Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the
difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems
of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history
from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro.
In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of
that government of men called the Freedmen's Bureau,--one
of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a
great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social
condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the
President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies,
East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive
slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when
the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along
the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted
hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry
children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,--a horde of
starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their
dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed
equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in
Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war,
and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri,
declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action
was approved, but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and
his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter,"
he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into
your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when
owners call for them deliver them." Such a policy was
difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared
themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had
deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and
plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength
to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and
producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote
Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they
should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to
discuss." So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed;
Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler's
"contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This
complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the
scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed
faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat
in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the
slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863. A month later Congress
called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July,
1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers
were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives
swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring:
"What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are
we to find food and shelter for women and children?"
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