Temat: DuBois: The Souls of Black Folks

The Souls of the Black Folk – 1903
DuBois The Souls of Black Folks

He opens his foreword with the information that the aim of the collection of essays is the ‘strange meaning of being black in the dawning of the Twentieth Century and he stresses the significance of the race issue with his famous statement ‘ the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line’.
He writes that he often feels the white man want to approach him with a question, which they do not ask out of delicacy or out of difficulty of framing it. The question is how does it feel to be a problem? He says that being a problem is a strange experience He describes how being a little boy playing with other children he first encountered that experience of being different, of being separated from the rest by a veil. He asks a dramatic question: Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house? DuBois writes that the American Negro has no chance of true self-consciousness, but can only see himself through the revelation of other worlds. ’It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one`s self through the eyes of others. One ever feels his two-ness, an American and A Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings. 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. He would not Americanize America for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in the 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 born a Negro and an American without being cursed or spit upon by his fellows without having the doors of Opportunity closed.
He compares the American Negroes to Israelites. Few men have ever worshipped Freedom with such unquestioning faith as did the American Negroes for two centuries. Emancipation was the key to promised land. Despite Emancipation the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. the shadow of great disappointment rests upon the Negro. Although the Negro has not yet reached their Canaan, the journey at least gave him leisure for reflection and self-examination. It changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, and self-respect. In his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself in some faint reflection of his power and mission.
For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, the dead weight of social degradation. The red stain of bastardy , which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women has stamped upon his race leading not only to the lost of ancient African chastity, but also hereditary weight of a mass of corruption.
What is needed is the fostering and developing the talents neither of the Negro, nor in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in a large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic. So the two races may give each other those characteristics both so sadly lack. And the Negroes have a lot to offer, there are not today 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 folk-lore are Indian and African, and all in all the black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

W.E.B. Du Bois - "Souls of the Black Folk"
- didn't know the slavery, was born in the North, a critic
- criticized Booker T. Washington
- traveled South seeing divisions between people so called for protest
- famous statement: "the problem of the XXth century is the problem of the color line."