Work · African & Africana Philosophy
The Souls of Black Folk
Essays on “double consciousness”, the veil and the colour line – and, against Booker T. Washington’s accommodation, a claim to higher education and civil rights.
Introduction
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) gathers fourteen chapters, several revised from essays in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly. Each chapter opens with lines of poetry and a bar of music from one of the “sorrow songs”, the spirituals of the enslaved, to which the final chapter is devoted. Its foreword announces the theme: the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line. Du Bois mixes history (the Freedmen’s Bureau), sociology (the Black Belt of Georgia), autobiography, an elegy for his infant son and a short story. The chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” openly broke with Washington’s leadership and helped prepare the Niagara Movement (1905) and later the NAACP.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Black Reconstruction in America1935 · W. E. B. Du Bois
- The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness1993 · Paul Gilroy
More works by W. E. B. Du Bois
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