INTRODUCTION THE STRANGE MEANING OF BEING BLACK: DU BOIS'S AMERICAN TRAGEDY

-w. E. B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races, " 1897

-W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Development of a People," 1904

"I knew. . . that practically my sole chance of earning a living combined with study was to teach, and after my work. . . in United States history, I conceived the idea of applying philosophy to an historical interpretation of race relations."

-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W E. B. Du Bois, 1968

The Souls of Black Folk is a complex, tragic, and deeply compelling vision of the fate of black folk in America. Published originally by A. C. McClurg and Company In Apnl1903, it is W. E., B. Du Bois's poignant but often biting dissent from the racist and nationalist ideologies animating post-Reconstruction political culture. Insisting that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," Du Bois wrote Souls to explore the "strange meaning of being black" in a society that viewed blacks with contempt. To that end, he detailed a sweeping tableau of African American social and spiritual life, emphasizing the struggle for civil rights, the economic and social legacies of slavery, and the contributions of blacks to America's identity as a nation. By expounding on a small family of concepts that characterized the plight and passion of the slaves and their descendants-including, for example, the notions of "double-consciousness" and "spiritual striving"-Du Bois brilliantly described African American efforts to cope with a society riven by racial prejudice. Writing as a philosopher, a historian, and a social critic, he aspired to unsettle that prejudice, hoping fervently to create a society in which it no longer held sway.

Souls is a diverse collection of essays and stories that defies any single category or genre. Still, it can be conveniently divided into three parts: chapters 1-3 have a distinctively historical character; chapters 4-9 display a sociological perspective in style and argument; and chapters 10-14 demonstrate Du Bois's attempt to capture the religious-spiritual meanings in the culture and experience of African Americans. Useful as they are, however, these groupings mask as much as they reveal of the complexity of the book. Du Bois worried that the fourteen pieces he had written over a seven-year period did not cohere, either as a whole or as parts of a whole. Indeed, in an extraordinary apologia (see p. 254) written just over a year after Souls was published, he showed his uneasiness about the collection, calling it "bits of history and biography, some descriptions of scenes and persons, something of controversy and criticism, some statistics and a bit of story-telling." Uncharacteristically self-effacing and perhaps stung by some reviewers, Du Bois noted the book's "sense of incompleteness." Yet he affirmed Souls' "personal and intimate tone of self-revelation," arguing that whatever had been "lost in authority" had been "gained in vividness."

An enduring contribution to American letters, Souls, in fact, is remarkable for its vividness and its authority. Punctuated throughout by the rhythms of human passion and intellectual insight, the text rewards an attentive, chapter-by-chapter perusal. By placing Souls in historical context and sketching a biographical portrait of Du Bois through the years surrounding the publication of the book, this introduction lays a basis for careful readings of his masterpiece. Souls is an extended meditation on racial prejudice, political leadership, the economic oppression of black laborers, and the development of African American culture both before and after emancipation. Most significantly, it is an original, philosophically informed, and tragic vision of American history, a gripping revelation of the triumphs, betrayals, and legacies that, in the wake of emancipation, shaped the souls of black folk through the first years of the twentieth century. Finally, Souls can be usefully illuminated by examining the wide range of responses that, over time, it has inspired in its readers.

During an era ruled by a seemingly permanent white consensus on segregation and disfranchisement, Du Bois's book offered black readers a unique burst of hope. For many blacks, writes biographer David Levering Lewis, Souls was "like fireworks going off in a cemetery. . . sound and light enlivening the inert and the despairing. It was an electrifying manifesto, mobilizing a people for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history." Reacting to turn-of-the-century white supremacist thought that had been buttressed in the popular mind by widely circulated "scientific" views of "the Negro" as inferior, beastlike, and uncivilized, Souls came as a profound refutation of prevailing racist dogma.

Souls should be read as a testament against the American system of racial apartheid that developed from approximately 1890 to 1910. That system consisted of many elements. "Jim Crow" laws emerged in every southern state, restricting black suffrage and segregating the races in schools, housing, transportation, and the use of public facilities. Historians fashioned a vision of American history that saw emancipation and the establishment of black civil and political rights during Reconstruction (1865-1877) as a tragic mistake. And segregation stiffened a form of economic subjugation by which white landowners and industrialists controlled southern black laborers. The United States Supreme Court sanctioned this system of apartheid when, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), it affirmed the power of a state to separate the races on railroads, thus declaring the "separate but equal" doctrine the law of the land.

When Du Bois's Souls was published, thousands of signs were visible across the South indicating the "colored" sections of railway cars, waiting rooms, theaters, and parks. In countless southern counties, there were no "colored" sections at the voting polls. In the course of daily human contact, the Jim Crow system was an assault on the dignity and humanity of black people. African Americans continued, however, to build their own schools, churches, and community life. Approximately 20 percent of southern blacks owned their own property by 1900 and could thus sustain a degree of independence from the larger political structure that denied them their citizenship rights. Still, the vast majority of southern blacks were sharecroppers, bound to the land as tenants by a cycle of debt, giving half of their cotton crop to a landowner or a furnishing merchant, and eking out a difficult living with the other half. Blacks who challenged this system of political and economic oppression frequently met with terrorist violence, the brutality of "lynch mobs" that did their deadly work to a frightful and largely unpunished extent during the years around 1903.

In fact, 1903 was an especially bad year in the downward spiral of American race relations. In several southern states "whitecapping"-a practice in which bands of white tenant farmers drove black landowners from their rightful lands-resumed. Accusations and revelations of "peonage" were prevalent in the press in 1903, especially emanating from the remote turpentine districts of Alabama. (Peonage was a practice in which black debtors could be forced to sign labor contracts, held in stockades, and hunted if they escaped. Federal investigations and trials led to only a handful of convictions for this new form of slavery.) Also in that year, a new breed of southern politician - the racist demagogue advocating strict enforcement of segregation, curtailment of black education, and even lynching - came to prominence when James K Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi.

The Supreme Court upheld disfranchisement laws in 1903 (in Giles v. Harris), thereby encouraging more states to pass them. And in popular culture, from cartooning to song, film, and children's stories, blacks had become the objects of jokes and widespread denigration. For example, The Leopard's Spots, a play by the virulently racist Thomas Dixon, became one of the most popular productions on Broadway in 1903, while two years later Dixon published The Clansman, a best-selling, melodramatic novel that sang the praises of the Ku Klux Klan and argued that sectional reconciliation after the Civil War had redeemed the blunder of emancipating the slaves. (The Clansman became the basis for D. W. Griffith's famous epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation, released to wide acclaim and protest in 1915.)6 In the context of these events, and in order to counter the racism that pervaded turn-of the-century America, Du Bois wrote the essays he compiled in his book of 1903.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, a small town nestled in the Berkshire hills of southwestern Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He grew up during Reconstruction and came of age as a young intellectual in the era of Jim Crow. Heir to a rich and complicated ancestry, he wrote proudly yet deceptively of his forebears in his autobiographical writings. Du Bois's paternal grandfather, Alexander Du Bois, was descended from French Huguenots who immigrated to New York State in the eighteenth century and then to the Bahamas to become slaveholding planters after the American Revolution. Born in Haiti, Alexander was the son of James, the planter, and one of his mulatto slave women. Du Bois's father, Alfred Du Bois, was born in Haiti in 1825 and moved to the United States sometime in the 1850s. After briefly serving in the Union army during the Civil War, Alfred Du Bois moved to Great Barrington in 1867. It is not likely that William Du Bois ever saw his father after infancy, because Alfred abandoned the family before his son was two years old.

William was raised by his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt, who was born in 1831 of African and Dutch ancestry and worked much of her life as a domestic. Mary Burghardt's great-grandfather Tom Burghardt was born in the early 1730s. He was enslaved in West Africa and brought to western Massachusetts, where he labored as the property of the Burghardts, one of the rich Dutch landowning families of the Hudson River valley. Through service in a company of Continental soldiers in the American Revolution, Tom received his freedom and settled on a farm near Great Barrington. Tom's grandson Othello Burghardt still owned that farm in 1868 when William was born in the town of some four thousand inhabitants, about fifty of whom formed a small black community. When Du Bois probed the complexity of African American identity formation, he understood fully that he was the fifth-generation descendant of a West African slave and the fourth-generation descendant of a West Indian slaveholder. His roots were African, Caribbean, and North American; they were also African American, Dutch, French, and, not least of all, New England.

"My birthplace was less important than my birth-time," Du Bois wrote in 1940. He was born in the year the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, Andrew Johnson impeached, Ulysses S. Grant elected president of the United States, and blacks first voted in large numbers and helped draft the new radical state constitutions in the Reconstruction South. During Du Bois's childhood, Frederick Douglass was still at the zenith of his leadership of black America, BookerT. Washington was getting an education and learning hygiene at Hampton Institute, and Mark Twain was writing Huckleberry Finn. Du Bois lived a long life-to the age of ninety-five dying in Ghana, West Africa, in 1963, a day before a grandson of slaves (Martin Luther King Jr.) delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech and only a few months before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Growing up in the wake of emancipation, Du Bois also survived to see the modem civil rights movement. When writing of the Reconstruction era, he contemplated the history in which he came of age. Du Bois lived ten years beyond the publication of a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Souls; he thus observed the consequences of two world wars and fell victim to America's vicious anti-radical politics during the Cold War. Having witnessed firsthand the cultural heritage of the generation of the freedpeopIe, he lived long enough to deliver speeches to the generation of the 1960s. Born three years after the Civil War, he endured to write critically of the centennial of that event.

The wellsprings of great intellect and ambition are not easy to fathom in a life of such scope and humble beginnings. Du Bois's mother was poor and struggled mightily to provide for him until her death in 1885, but she somehow raised a boy of lonely determination, extraordinary intellectual gifts, and fierce educational ambition. A year after graduating from high school in Great Barrington, the only black in a class of thirteen, the seventeen-year-old Du Bois enrolled at Fisk University, a black college founded during Reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee. Supported by Great Barrington ministers and teachers who raised money for his first scholarship, he studied for three years at Fisk, spending two of his summers as a rural schoolteacher among poor black folk in a village in eastern Tennessee.

Du Bois powerfully evokes the experience of these summers in the beautifully written and persistently ironic fourth chapter of Souls, "Of the Meaning of Progress." One of the most gripping essays in the book, this anthropological portrait of a folk culture is the sad story of Josie, of her community, and of what Du Bois called the "unconscious moral heroism" of a peasantry that hoped against and hated its fate. Du Bois grew to love these folk, he wrote, "for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation."

Du Bois earned a bachelor's degree at Fisk in 1888 and was admitted to Harvard College as a junior in the autumn of that year. As a Harvard undergraduate, he received an extraordinary education, studying philosophy with William James and George Santayana, history with Albert Bushnell Hart, English rhetoric with Barrett Wendell, and the emerging social sciences, such as economics, with Frank Taussig. Still, he felt frustrated while attending Harvard by his frequent encounters with racial segregation.

Largely avoiding the social life of Harvard, Du Bois did become active as a lecturer in the black community of Cambridge and Boston. "I was in Harvard, but not of it," Du Bois would later write, capturing his insatiable embrace of the classical education the place offered him as well as his cunning negotiation of the color line that would become the multidisciplinary subject of his life's work. His contemptuous silence in response to the question with which he begins chapter 1 of Souls-"How does it feel to be a problem?" -expressed an attitude, even a way of life, conditioned into his bones, in great part during his Harvard years. "Being a problem is a strange experience," he wrote in Souls, "even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe."

After graduating with a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1890, Du Bois entered Harvard's graduate school, first enrolling in political science. By 1892, after two years of applications, he received a scholarship from the Slater Fund for the Education of Negroes to study abroad at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Du Bois spent two resplendent and intellectually stimulating years enjoying Berlin and traveling across Europe as a young gentleman-scholar. Cultivating his love of opera and admiring the great capitals of the colonial empires, he also fell in love with a young German woman. Just a day after hearing a performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Du Bois celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday in Berlin. Reflecting on the brief program he prepared for his private fete, he wrote passionately of Europe's "great inspiring air of world culture." Echoing the Bible's Esther, he dedicated his life to his people: "to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race. . . I will go unto the king-which is not according to the law and if I perish - I perish."

In 1894 Du Bois returned from Gennany a changed but still young man whose soul, he later recalled, had been penneated by "the beauty and elegance of life." Expressing a temperament shared by many Americans, he declared that he "had been, above all, in a hurry. I wanted a world, smooth, and swift, and had no time for rounded comers and ornament, for unhurried thought and slow contemplation. . . . I saw in arch and stone and steeple the history and striving of men and also their taste and expression. Form, color, and worlds took new combinations and meanings."12

In 1895 Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, completing a dissertation in history that was published a year later as The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Upon leaving Harvard, he took his first teaching position, at Wilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio, remaining only two years at an institution that he found intellectually stunting and religiously too conservative. In 1896, with a fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois returned east to conduct a door-to-door study of Philadelphia's black population that resulted in his second book, a landmark in the sociological study of urban America, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). The following year he took a position in history and economics at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1910, teaching, sponsoring conferences, and producing sixteen detailed reports (The Atlanta University Studies) on various aspects of African American economic, social, cultural, and educational life. While living in segregated Atlanta between 1897 and 1903, Du Bois completed the essays that became The Souls of Black Folk.

WHAT THEN IS A RACE?

In March 1897, in the busy months before moving to Atlanta, Du Bois laid the basis for the argument of Souls with a paper he delivered in Washington, D.C. to the inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy. Founded by Du Bois, Alexander Crummell, and several other African American intellectuals, the American Negro Academy was the first national black learned society; its purpose was to promote the cultivation of a specifically Negro contribution to American culture and world civilization. Members of the academy shared a belief that it was the duty of intellectual elites to lead the masses by diffusing knowledge among them, to uplift the ordinary people in their midst. Until its demise in 1928, the Academy and its small, all-male membership published twenty-two "occasional papers" on subjects ranging from civil and political rights, history, and religion to the place of black institutions in American life. Their aim was almost always the cultural assimilation of African Americans, although they also valued the distinctive elements of African American culture.

Titled "The Conservation of Races" (see p. 228), Du Bois's paper before the American Negro Academy was a philosophically significant critique of the racial theories dominant in his day. As Du Bois well knew, nineteenth-century racial thought was largely committed to the now discredited view that an individual's racial identity is fixed by his or her racial type, a kind of biological racial essence. In general, advocates of this position held that two or more individuals belonged to the same race if, and only if, they embodied the same physical racial type.

By assuming that physical racial types exist, racial theorists could claim to account for the supposed fact that members of different races display different psychological and social tendencies. They maintained that the characteristic psychological and social traits (habits and abilities) of distinct racial groups were effects of the distinct racial types defining those groups. Nineteenth-century racial theorists thus embraced a form of biological determinism, often called "scientific racism," that invoked physical racial differences to explain the perceived psychological and social differences among the races.

In his paper 'The Conservation of Races," Du Bois challenges this biological determinism, explicitly rejecting the belief that physical differences (such as in color, blood, and size of the skull) between the races account for psychological or "spiritual" differences. Instead he looks to social and historical factors for an explanation. "While race differences have followed mainly physical race lines," he proclaims, "no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences. . . the deeper differences are spiritual, psychical differences." According to Du Bois, one needs to invoke the "subtle forces" of history, law, habits of thought, the ends of human striving, and religion to account for the distinctive spiritual lives of racial groups. In other words, explaining the unique spiritual message of a race is a matter for the human sciences (history and sociology), not the natural sciences (biology and chemistry). For Du Bois, studying the social history of a racial group is essential to making sense of its spiritual identity. Experience and condition, he asserts, forge the habits of head and heart separating one people from another.

Du Bois's turn from the natural to the human sciences was closely related to his attempt to modify the concept of race. In addition to explaining spiritual differences between races in sociohistorical terms, he defines a race as a group whose identity is partly fixed by sociohistorical characteristics. A race, Du Bois writes, is "a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life." With this formulation, Du Bois analyzes the concept of race by citing both biological (common blood) and sociohistorical (common language and common history) attributes. Although his references to some of these attributes may puzzle the reader, there can be little doubt that, in stressing sociohistorical conditions, he aims to deny the thesis that physical type alone constitutes racial identity. Invoking the perspective of the human sciences, Du Bois rejects biological determinism and insists that racial identity per se has a nonphysical, sociohistorical dimension.

In Souls, Du Bois explicitly draws on his belief that the spiritual life of a race can be best explained in historical and sociological terms. To be sure, the book contains some passages that appear to tie Negro temperament to Negro biology. For example, Du Bois seems to embrace some sort of biological determinism when, in chapter 10, he describes "the Negro" as a "religious animal," with a "native appreciation of the beautiful," whose emotional nature "turns instinctively toward the supernatural." Still, the dominant thrust of Souls is Du Bois's attempt to put the spiritual world of blacks in historical and social perspective. Du Bois writes that "Negro blood has a message for the world," yet his interpretations of the "soul-life" and striving which express that message allude never to blood but always to social and historical circumstance. As Du Bois depicts it, African American spirituality derives its character from the distinctive drama that is African American history. Indeed, it is this multifaceted drama, with its richly textured vignettes of slavery, emancipation, emerging leadership, and the psychological striving of a people, that Souls portrays as the complicated and nonbiological substance of a black identity in America.

TRAGEDY AND TWONESS

Because Du Bois never intended Souls to be a straightforward history of race in America, his book may disorient readers who do not go slowly and read deeply in a text that is in part a poet's history-an attempt to take the pulse and capture the pathos of an historical era. The product of a nineteenth-century tradition that made history into literature, Souls is a group of essays intended more to inspire the historical imagination than to amass scholarly knowledge or recount facts and figures.

Du Bois began early in life to appreciate history as literature. As a fourteen-year-old high school sophomore in Great Barrington, he purchased the five-volume History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay, apparently devouring Macaulay's famous narrative of the English nation with great relish. Du Bois would later recoil from the arguments in that book, for they virtually sang in the service of imperialism. But as biographer David Levering Lewis writes, Macaulay's "matchless narrative powers" may have never ceased to ring in Du Bois's "inner ear." Writing in 1828, Macaulay declared that "the perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. But by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction."19 In Souls, Du Bois avoids the kind of nationalism that drove Macaulay's narrative of English progress and glory. But he does search for the spirit of the Age of Emancipation, for the searing ironies in America's promise, and for the troubled uncertainties of the post-freedom generations of black people.

Du Bois's history in Souls is by no means a narrow picture of the black experience alone. It is history that assumes that broad generalization is the ultimate aim of historical understanding, that nations have discernible stories with central themes and living responsibilities. Ultimately, this is history that seeks to understand the legacies of epochal events, to face honestly the "heritage of slavery," to know how emancipation came as cosmic deliverance, but how Reconstruction, an extraordinary experiment in "social regeneration," was "in large part foredoomed to failure." The "attractions" in Souls as history, to borrow from Macaulay, are in Du Bois's ability to help the reader see and feel an American tragedy, the "great republic's" failure at its most "concrete test."

Souls sings like a prayerful wail from the shipwreck of black freedom as it lists on the shoals of segregation. Yet it appeals because it is an original and lyrical expression of the ways African Americans have forged an old, beautiful, and sustaining culture, a musical, religious, and growing intellectual heritage that offered many "gifts" to a nation that might yet redeem itself. Souls is social and cultural history that pleads for recognition of both the suffering and the art in the souls of black folk. Together, the essays form the tale of peasants surviving on a faith that makes them strive for a better day and of an emerging leadership class readying itself to think and to organize in a modem age. Its historical and sociological essays (roughly the first two-thirds of the book) lead the reader to Du Bois's meditations on the religious lives of African Americans and to his compelling rendition of their most enduring creations, their plaintive expressions of profound trust in a higher, ethical order-the sorrow songs at the end of the book.

As poetic history, Souls contains probing descriptions of the spirituality, or "soul-life," which Du Bois attributes to the African American experience. For example, Du Bois uses the metaphors of "double consciousness" and "the veil" to depict a two-dimensional pattern of estrangement that shaped the lives of black Americans in the age of Jim Crow. For Du Bois, the refusal of whites to recognize black Americans' humanity and culture has resulted, first, in whites seeing blacks as strangers and, second, in the tendency of blacks to see themselves as strangers. "It is a peculiar sensation," he remarks, "this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Seeing himself from the white world's perspective, Du Bois's American Negro views himself in a dark and false light, as if "born with a veil." Knowing no "true self-consciousness," he knows himself always as others know him, and so always as other. Ever feeling his "twoness," he succumbs to a conflict between two opposed selves: the one seeing and the other seen; the one contemptuous and the other remote; the one American and the other Negro. The essence of the Negro's soul-life, Du Bois says, is a perpetual and difficult struggle to overcome this conflict and self-estrangement; it is a "history. . . of strife. . . [of] longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self."

"Tragedy" is Du Bois's name for the suffering wrought by the two dimensional pattern of estrangement burdening blacks' lives. In merging his double self, Du Bois's Negro wishes "neither of the older selves to be lost. . : to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows." White Americans, however, by deriding the Negro and refusing to see him as a co-worker in the nation's culture, persist in disavowing their ties to black folk. By so behaving, they thwart the Negro's effort to form a complex identity that admits and integrates duality. The tragedy resulting from such behavior is apparent, Du Bois claims, in the lives of blacks and whites alike. It was evident, for example, in the life of Alexander Crummell, the black theologian and missionary whose life Du Bois praises in chapter 12. Crummell, Du Bois suggests, worked in estranged isolation, "with. . . little human sympathy," epitomizing "the tragedy" of an age in which "men know so little of men."

Du Bois's America is a tragic land, for although America would not be America "without her Negro people," and thus without her Negroes' gifts of "story and song. . . sweat and brawn. . . and spirit," white Americans still repudiate the Negro and so alienate themselves from a group whose presence has shaped their identities as Americans. In Souls' only piece of fiction, "Of the Coming of John" (chapter 13), Du Bois again explores the tragic effects of this sort of estrangement in a harrowing tale of two young men whose deeply connected lives neither blacks nor whites see as connected. In Du Bois's words, "the black folk thought of one John, and he was black, and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest."

As historian Joel Williamson has observed, Du Bois's interpretation of the Negro's historical striving owes a debt to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel. Characterizing the Negro as a "seventh son," Du Bois, in chapter 1, depicts him as a latecomer to the stage of the world's history. Appearing in the aftermath of the six peoples who, in Hegel's scheme, have already realized their spiritual destinies (the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans), Du Bois's Negro struggles relentlessly for a recognition and a self realization that would heal the wound of America's double-edged tragedy.

Du Bois revises Hegel's philosophy of history by portraying black Americans as agents in the drama of the world's historical development (Hegel had relegated blacks to the "threshhold" of history. Africa, he said, "is no historical part of the world."). Speaking of the "history of the American Negro," he refers neither to individuals nor to aggregates of individuals but to the Negro race as a spiritual force with a developing and unique world-historical destiny. Consistent with his argument in 'The Conservation of Races" (see p. 228), Du Bois uses the idea of a racially shared and distinctive spiritual identity (born of a people's collective experience) to frame his more specific accounts of emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Du Bois's approach to the legacies of emancipation is most immediatelyevident in chapter 1, where, after analyzing the notion of "double-consciousness," he offers up what David Levering Lewis calls his "signature"-the compression of huge pieces of history into single paragraphs, images, or metaphors. Beginning with an allusion to "the days of bondage" and ending two paragraphs later with an image of education as the "mountain path to Canaan," Du Bois sweeps his reader through the forty years since emancipation. There are no details here to aid the reader nor to block the feelings of unrestrained joy at the moment of freedom and unfathomable pain in the aftermath of freedom's prolonged denials. Instead, the reader feels the legacy of emancipation as though it were a haunting, murky, even frightful cloud hanging over the body

politic. "Forty years of national life" brought great change, Du Bois says, "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!' " Comparing

the Negro to Banquo's ghost, come to terrify the tyrant (Macbeth) who has had Banquo murdered, Du Bois suggests that black folk and their history will forever torment post-emancipation America. Drawing on the complex and ambiguous imagery of Shakespearean tragedy, he compels his reader to hear what he would later call his "cry at midnight thick within the veil, when none rightly knew the coming day." Souls should not be the only thing one reads about emancipation and its aftermath. But it provides an evocative and moving chorus for more standard, equally valuable histories."

Throughout Souls, Du Bois attempts to revise history, to dislodge the dominant, white supremacist historical memory of the nation in favor of a more inclusive, if tragic vision of America's past. In chapter 2, "Of the Dawn of Freedom," for example, he presents a logical case for viewing the Freedmen's Bureau (the federal agency created to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom) as a positive force rather than as an arch villain of the alleged debacle of Reconstruction. Far ahead of his time with such an interpretation, and as a prologue to his later, more scholarly works (such as 'The Benefits of Reconstruction" in 1909 and his classic Black Reconstruction in 1935), Du Bois offers a sympathetic portrayal of the Bureau's all too short life.27 He ignores neither the flaws and failings of the Bureau nor those of its agents. But in a combination of descriptive history and theatrical pageantry, he creates a new framework in which the plight of the freedmen might be better understood.

In another attempt to revise historical memory, Du Bois speaks in the voice of a prophet. Urging the reader to cast his or her vision to the rear of the grim parade of history, he identifies three images in the procession of Sherman's march across Georgia at the end of the Civil War: "the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer," writes Du Bois, "and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns. . . . In vain were they ordered back . . . ; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands."28 Here are the nameless freedpeople, inexorably liberated and self-liberated in a terrible war, given equal billing in this historical theater with the tragic southern planters and the awesome symbol of Yankee destruction and victory, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Finally, in a stunning metaphor about passion in the New South, Du Bois characterizes "two figures" that typified the Reconstruction era and the power of its legacy: "the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves. . . ;and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries." Past and present meet in this imagery with frightful intensity; the picture Du Bois paints is nothing less than an alternative vision of the meaning of the Civil War, one that most white Americans did their best not to see in the late nineteenth century. 'These were the saddest sights of that woful day," Du Bois writes, "and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children's children live to-day." Here are not the customary forms of old soldiers who had met in battle and could now clasp hands in mutual respect, images one could find by the 1890s all over American culture, on town greens, and at BlueGray reunions. Rather, Du Bois's "two figures" are veterans of an even deeper conflict and, perhaps, of a violence equal to that of the war itself. Here are the images of an old male slaveholder, the broken symbol of wealth, power, and sexual domination, and an old black woman, representing "Mammy," mother and survivor. The heritage of slavery lives on in these "two passing figures of the present-past," demonstrating that racial reconciliation, unlike sectional reconciliation, demands a serious confrontation with the hostility rooted in rape, lynching, and racism. Deep memories in the South, in Du Bois's vision, make bridging this chasm of race and gender all but impossible.

Readers will hear many echoes of chapters 1-3 later in the book: duality as the burdensome yet strengthening fate of being black in America; the celebration of education for its own sake; the significance of black suffrage as the bedrock of the freedpeople's liberty; the complex interplay between "success" and "failure" in the story of Reconstruction; the role of leadership for a people and a nation undergoing rebirth; and the crucial question of civic responsibility for the freedpeople's destiny, of what governments owe their people, and of what people must accomplish by themselves. Indeed, the book can be read as an extended reflection on the stakes of the Civil War and emancipation for American society.

Du Bois uses Reconstruction as a symbolic measure of the losses and gains in the politics of race and as a means of formulating his ironic conception of "progress." As literary scholar Eric Sundquist has written, Du Bois's "Of the Dawn of Freedom" becomes a "false dawn." The bleak, brooding ending of chapter 2 argues that in order for America to find its soul, it had to free the slaves. The American emancipation, compelled by history, ideology, and necessity, seemed nevertheless to require betrayal; the ex-slaves were reborn from bondage, many only to die in a wasteland of debt peonage. 'Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud," Du Bois writes. "And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt." It is significant that Du Bois's tragic vision of history and the haunting images of strife he laces throughout "Of the Dawn of Freedom" are placed between two chapters that end with ringing appeals to the first principles of the Declaration of Independence. In Souls, history is a prophetic demand upon the creeds of a forgetful country.

Du Bois's stingingly, if respectfully, critical treatment of Booker T. Washington in chapter 3 is a good introduction to the developing debate between the Du Bois and Washington camps of black leadership in the early twentieth century. Washington, who was born a slave in western

Virginia in 1856 and had been educated at Hampton Institute, a freedmen's school, was the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. By the time Du Bois began to challenge him in Souls and other writings, Washington had established himself as an educational statesman, the primary spokesman of black America, and the leader of a large network of disciples-the 'Tuskegee Machine"-who edited newspapers, owned businesses, and directed schools modeled on Tuskegee.

Washington's doctrine of accommodationism-according to which blacks would acquiesce in legal segregation and disfranchisement while engaging in self-reliant economic development within their own communities- gained a wide following among blacks and admiration among whites. Although he never held elective office, Washington was an adroit power broker; he exercised his clout by some occasionally ruthless methods. Rival black newspaper editors or aspiring young educators and intellectuals risked unemployment and other forms of intimidation if they embraced political activism rather than Washington's accommodationist social policy. Known as the "Wizard of Tuskegee," Washington became an informal adviser to American presidents and wielded great influence among wealthy white philanthropists. Du Bois's statement that Washington's "ascendancy" was "easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876" was not hyperbole in 1903.

Du Bois and other largely northern-born and -educated black leaders increasingly objected to Washington's willingness to exchange political and social equality for industrial education and economic selfdetermination. Du Bois led an effort to counter Washington's authority by turning the attention of black and white Americans alike to demands for full citizenship rights, full economic opportunity, and access to classical as well as industrial education. By 1903, a debate over educational and leadership strategies had become an all-out political struggle over the distribution of power and resources in black America. Careers, ideas, and human rights were at stake in the battles between the Tuskegee Machine and the cultured and classically educated black elite that Du Bois called the 'Talented Tenth.

In Souls, Du Bois places Washington's rise to prominence in a broad historical context; his program of "adjustment and submission" and his "gospel of Work and Money" found fertile ground in "the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing." Du Bois sees Washington's leadership as the direct product of sectional reconciliation; the Wizard of Tuskegee became a kind of grand master of ceremonies, emerging from the ashes of wartime and Reconstruction bitterness. Fair or not, Du Bois claims that Washington had become "the leader not of one race but of two,-a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro." Thus does Du Bois bitterly contest the memory of the Civil War, as well as Washington's leadership during the emerging age of Jim Crow. If the American reconciliation would mean "industrial slavery and civic death. . . with permanent legislation [putting blacks] into a position of inferiority," then Booker Washington must be resisted. Otherwise, Du Bois, the historian/ social critic, predicts a "harvest of disaster" for blacks and whites.

It has never been adequate to describe Du Bois exclusively as an "elitist" while portraying Washington as a practical builder of institutions and livelihoods. It is equally inadequate to say that Washington and Du Bois had the same ultimate goals for their people, because their educational aims and social and political strategies were very different. An understanding of this famous dispute in African American history may be better served by oppositions such as "work and thought," "craft and culture," "livelihood and the meaning of life." But even these dichotomies flatten out the complexity of the ideological conflict that Du Bois explores in chapter 3 of Souls. Such dichotomies, moreover, fail to do justice to Du Bois's proud demands for black higher education in chapters 5 and 6, "Of the Wings of Atalanta" and "Of the Training of Black Men." Du Bois's "training" at Fisk, Harvard, and Berlin informs every page of those chapters. Only his superior education, rare for a black man in turn-of-the century America, could account for the audacity and the confidence of the famous passage at the end of chapter 6: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil."

Du Bois's eloquent praise of higher learning and his personal challenges to national black leadership give way in chapters 7-9 to the observations of a historical sociologist. Written like a historical travelogue depicting the "Egypt of the Confederacy," chapter 7 provides some of the most moving and plaintive images of the South in the book. This essay may have been Du Bois's self-styled answer to the multitude of articles that had appeared in Harper's and other popular magazines for at least two decades. Typically inviting northern readers to journey into America's romantic past, these articles described an exotic South surviving in stock characters-old planters, new entrepreneurs, and especially the old-time plantation "darkies." In Du Bois's Black Belt, however, there are no happy darkies and no myth of a harmonious South left to its own devices. Combining the beauty and power of nature, the sweep of history in epic proportions, and the painful ruck of sharecroppers' daily lives, Du Bois 'forges indelible memories that counter the romance of the Lost Cause and national reunion. His landscape and the people on it seem to inhabit another time, trapped in a past they cannot escape.

In chapter 8 Du Bois the sociologist engages in his own brand of muckraking journalism, writing in the spirit and purpose of a Progressive reformer. Du Bois's descriptive journey through Dougherty County, his exposure of the living conditions and despair of this black peasantry, is a rural southern equivalent to northern muckrakers' exposure of urban political corruption and the tenement housing conditions of America's laboring class. Du Bois does not idealize his peasants; he gives them no false agency. Some are simply "lewd" or "vicious"; others are "intelligent and responsible persons" and are likely to end up landowners. On the whole, however, Du Bois's journalism shames the nation by confronting it with a world of impoverished sharecroppers, doomed to live out their lives in a "hopeless serfdom."

Finally, in chapter 9, Du Bois shifts from the psyche ofthe black peasantry to one of his great themes-the meaning of segregation itself. With remarkable sympathy for the whole South and for the essential irony in its history, Du Bois writes of a place full of "tragedies and comedies . . . a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change qnd excitement and unrest." Du Bois's South is certainly no undifferentiated seat of evil. We tend too often perhaps to see the Jim Crow world as a system of laws, divided institutions and politics, even of separate economies. So it was. But in this chapter Du Bois reaches for the psychological meanings and historical roots of segregation, for the moral consequences and sheer loss of human knowledge and potential in a "world" that flows by him "in two great streams" that rarely touch. Whites and blacks are "strangers," says Du Bois, with a mutual fate.

Souls is historical literature that breathed a heavy sigh of tragedy into America's optimistic sense of itself. In Du Bois's own time, many perceptive readers wondered about the book's somber tones. In 1906, William James wrote to Du Bois congratulating him on the power of Souls, but questioning the despair of the book. "You must not think I am personally wedded to the minor key," Du Bois answered his mentor. "On the contrary I am tuned to the most aggressive and unquenchable hopefulness. I wanted in this case simply to reveal fully the other side to the world" (see p. 262). The endless tension between pain and beauty, between the full range of suffering and the persistence of possibility in American history, is what Du Bois sought to capture by bringing the black experience to the center of the story.

In 1956, Langston Hughes penned a letter (see p. 267) to the eighty-eighty year-old Du Bois, declaring that he had just read Souls "for perhaps the tenth time- the first time having been some forty years ago." "Its beauty and passion and power," wrote Hughes, "are as moving and as meaningful as ever." Hughes had just sat rapturously with the fiftieth-anniversary edition and, by that time, twenty-sixth printing of Du Bois's classic work. Souls had fallen out of print for ten years (throughout the 1940s) before Du Bois himself bought the plates from McClurg and Company for $100 in 1949.

By the early 1950s, Du Bois was among a growing number of American academics, writers, and artists who were attacked, and sometimes ruined, by McCarthyism. The anti-Communist crusade led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy suppressed the works of left-leaning American intellectuals in many schools and in mainstream publishing. Through the concerted efforts of friends such as Howard Fast and Herbert Aptheker, who themselves became victims of censorship, the Blue Heron Press brought out the 1953 commemorative edition in which Du Bois made a small number of significant changes that we cite in our notes.

During the first five years of publication, the original edition of Souls sold 9,595 copies. As Aptheker has demonstrated, the book influenced a wide variety of readers and received a remarkable range of reviews. Although much of the African American press controlled by Booker T. Washington's political machine ignored the book, numerous independent black journals and individual voices rejoiced. Bostonian John Daniels spoke for many black leaders in seeing beyond the emerging Du Bois-Washington conflict, urging his readers to judge Souls "not as an argument, as an anti-Washington protest, but as a poem, a spiritual, not intellectual offering, an appeal not to the head but to the heart." The book deserved the "highest place," said Daniels, "not that of a polemic, a transient thing, but that of a poem, a thing permanent." Du Bois's prose poem was, indeed, to become a permanent fixture and a renewable literary resource in the fight against racism. .

Souls also elicited a wide range of personal responses, especially of pride and gratitude among blacks. As a student at Cornell University, the eighteen-year-old Jessie Fauset wrote to Du Bois, thanking him "as though it had been a personal favor, for your book The Souls of Black Folk.' " Fauset was an ecstatic and perceptive reader and would later emerge as a literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. "I am glad, glad you wrote it," she said, "we have needed someone to voice the intricacies of the blind maze of thought and action along which the modem, educated colored man and woman struggles. It hurt you to write that book, didn't it?"For so young a person to see, and even share in, what she called the author's "exquisite suffering" was to grasp the heart of Du Bois's sense of tragedy.41 Part 2 of this book reprints a variety of such correspondence to and from Du Bois, demonstrating the range of responses that Souls stimulated in its readers.

White southern newspapers reviewed Souls more than one might suppose, although many found only disfavor with Du Bois's alternatives to Washington's accommodationism and industrial training; Some southern papers declared the book "dangerous for the Negro to read" and one paper urged Du Bois's indictment for "inciting rape." In at least one instance, a white southern intellectual tried, if falteringly, to meet Du Bois across the chasm separating what both would consider the "best" of the two races. In the South Atlantic Quarterly, John Spencer Bassett, a southern historian with a keen, if paternalistic, interest in black life and history, wrote a careful review of Souls. With a remarkable combination of respect and racist condescension, Bassett admired Washington yet praised Du Bois's embrace of "ethical culture," his representation of how "the soul is more than the body." Despite his commitment to racial segregation, Bassett understood Du Bois the intellectual. "He makes us feel what an awful thing it is to be in America a Negro," wrote Bassett, "and at the same time be a man of culture." Ordinary blacks experienced race prejudice in "frowns" and "Jim Crow cars." But to the "man of culture," prejudice was a "locked door in his face." While Washington would have blacks accept the "Veil," said Bassett, "Du Bois would chafe and fret and tear his heart out."

Northern reviews of Souls were remarkably sympathetic, although many found only the chapter on Washington worth noting, while some were especially concerned with Du Bois's anger. Typical of such responses was a review published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that protested Du Bois's "tendency to snarl against social customs, as evidence of mental bitterness." The reviewer, Carl Kelsey of the University of Pennsylvania, admired Du Bois's discussion of the "psychical evolution of the Negro," but, speaking perhaps for many fellow American academics, he simply could not abide the author's chronicling of "the failures, the injustices and the wrongs." "Of the Coming of John" (chapter 13) was a "good story," said Kelsey, "but it ends in tragedy."

Other favorable notices for Souls celebrated the very presence of such a book. A Chicago journal, The Public, said it was "drawn irresistibly. . . into full sympathy" by Du Bois's style and argument. Sounding much like the reactions of white abolitionist readers to the great slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and others in the 1840s, The Public declared that "never before has the Negro asked with so much emphasis and such power of thought and persuasiveness of diction, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' as in this book." For white radicals, Souls came as political inspiration. The socialist Horace 1. Traubel, writing in the Conservator of Philadelphia, announced that Du Bois's "fiery appeals encourage our faith against the despair of democracy." Using Du Bois to speak about African Americans as the abolitionist John Brown might have a half century earlier, Traubel declared that the black man "must not humiliate himse1f to any cry of the hounds. . . he has every right to liberty in all its clauses. If he has no right to that liberty. . . then no man has that right now or hereafter."

Souls inspired enormous national and international acclaim (a British edition was published in 1905, it was warmly reviewed in Germany and New Zealand, and it was widely read by African leaders throughout the twentieth century), which suggests that its politics involved much more than opposition to Washington and the Tuskegee Machine. In 1913 the black scholar William Ferris named Souls "the political Bible of the Negro race." Ferris also remembered the "thrill and pleasure" with which he first read Souls: "It was an eventful day in my life. It affected me just like Carlyle's 'Heroes and Hero Worship' . . . , Emerson's 'Nature and Other Addresses.' . . . Souls came to me as a bolt from the blue. It was the rebellion of a fearless soul, the protest of a noble nature against the blighting American caste prejudice. It proclaimed in thunder tones and in words of magic beauty the worth and sacredness of human personality even when clothed in a black skin." In 1933 the writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson observed that Souls' impact was "greater upon and within the Negro race than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom's Cabin." And in 1961 the literary historian . Saunders Redding described the book as "more history-making than historical" Thus we can begin to see how a literary classic evolves through time, how, as contemporary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, Souls became a "cultural initiation rite" for black writers, as well as for their legion of readers.45 At the end of the twentieth century, it remains an influential text. However, the book should be read not only for its literary value, but as a work of history, sociology, and philosophical analysis about race in America.

Du Bois was fully aware that Souls affected his readers aesthetically as well as intellectually. He wanted to unveil for them the mournful dramas of American history, to help them see history itself as something evolving slowly over time, with whole peoples laboring, heroically and rudely, against their fate. He wanted to take readers on journeys they had not imagined and, as in all great travels, bring them home changed. With similar aims in mind, in 1904 Du Bois wrote an essay for the International Journal of Ethics, 'The Development of a People" (see p. 238). Most of Souls' major themes- the irony of progress, the complexity of human identity, the nature of cultural development, and, above all, the thought that all questions must be examined historically--are evident in this essay, which reads as though Du Bois intended to provide a succinct reprise of Souls. In the South Du Bois revisits in 'The Development of a People," "the awful incubus of the past broods like a writhing sorrow, and when we turn our faces from that past, we turn it not to forget but to remember."46 'The Development of a People" appears in this book as a postscript to Souls; written after Du Bois had no doubt read most of his reviews, it offers a brief restatement of his case.

The joy in reading Souls often comes from the power of its late Victorian prose style, its masterly use of the essay form, and its tragic vision translated into story and analysis. In short, Souls gives pleasure in its eloquence. As literary historian Arnold Rampersad has shown, Du Bois the artist-historian was always aware of the classical forms of rhetoric in which he was trained at Fisk and Harvard. He was the scientific researcher and the self-conscious craftsman, the historian, writes Ram Souls is an example of style that is not mere decoration in the place of argument. Images become explanation in many chapters, whether they represent real places in Dougherty County or at Atlanta University; half-mythic sites like Josie's grave or the visage of the unnamed Abraham Lincoln (the "long-headed man with the care-chiselled face"); or the fully mythic individual portrayed by the "figure veiled and bowed," sitting by the "King's Highway" at the end of chapter 2. 'The very idea of style is infected with a central ambiguity," writes historian Peter Gay, "it must give information as well as pleasure. It opens windows on both truth and beauty-a bewildering double vista." Souls should be read with this ambiguity in mind; its author saw the mutual infection of narration and analysis as a good thing. As Eric Sundquist has put it, Souls should be read as a "narrative experiment with dramatic form" and as a "musical book."

Of the many personal responses to Souls that Du Bois received, none were more poignant than the one written by a Russian Jewish immigrant living on New York City's Lower East Side (see p. 260). Having discovered a copy of Souls on Delancey Street, D. Tabak read it with an unforgettable combination of anguish, guilt, and exhilaration and declared himself "overpowered by a peculiar pain that was so much akin to bliss." Tabak's words aptly capture the spirit ofDu Bois's celebration of the sorrow songs in the final chapter. Borrowing from numerous interpreters before him, Du Bois gives a meaning to these songs that has withstood the test of time. "Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope," he writes, "a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence . . . that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins." Du Bois's statement comes coupled with his bold insistence on the originality of black folk music, "blending," he says, with many European forms to produce "the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas." Ultimately, Du Bois returns his celebration of the spirituals to one of the book's primary themes the centrality of the black experience in American history. The final pages of Souls ring with questions of a sort that voluntary immigrants have also asked: "Your country? How came it yours? . . . Would America have been America without her Negro people?"

Du Bois's famous epigraphs, consisting of bars of music from the Negro spirituals, balanced in every chapter but one with poetic verse from the Western literary tradition, provide the extraordinary framework for Souls. With these bars and verses Du Bois reaches for a harmoniously integrated cultural identity, the "true self-consciousness" which this book so movingly seeks. In Du Bois's epigraphs, and in his final chapter, the unnamed American slaves and world-famous poets speak from the same text of life and sing in the same church. Friedrich Schiller sits with Josie singing "My Way's Cloudy," waiting for the Lord to "send them angels down," and James Russell Lowell sits with all the freedpeople singing "My Lord What a Mourning." At the end of the book, Du Bois waxes somber and passionate all at once; he himself becomes the prayerful singer, naming sorrows and breathing hope. He sees a vision and hears the sounds of freedom through his office window in Atlanta; the children below are "singing to the sunshine" a song of weariness and cheer.