The Souls of Black Folk

Contents

1. The Forethought 3 min 8

   Du Bois introduces his “little book” as a study of “the strange meaning of being black” at the start of the twentieth century, whose problem is “the problem of the color-line.” He outlines its plan: two chapters on emancipation and its aftermath, one on Booker T. Washington, chapters on the worlds within and without the Veil and on education, two on the Black peasantry, and then chapters from within the Veil on religion, sorrow and song. He notes the earlier magazine versions and the bars of Sorrow Songs before each chapter, and declares himself one of those within the Veil.

2. I Of Our Spiritual Strivings 22 min 8

   Du Bois asks how it feels to be “a problem,” recalls discovering the Veil as a schoolboy in New England, and defines double-consciousness: seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous world, an American and a Negro, “two warring ideals in one dark body.” He traces this strife through Black artisans, professionals and artists, and through successive hopes since emancipation: freedom, then the ballot, then book-learning. Prejudice, disfranchisement and self-doubt have dimmed each ideal. He concludes that work, culture and liberty must be sought together, and that Black Americans have gifts to bring to the nation.

3. II Of the Dawn of Freedom 51 min 6

   A history of the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1861–72. Fugitive slaves flooded the Union armies, which improvised “contraband” camps, leased plantations and Sherman’s land grants. Congress created the Bureau in 1865 under General O. O. Howard. Du Bois credits it with relief, labor contracts, Black schools and colleges, and recognition of freedmen in court; he faults it for paternalism, corrupt agents, the collapse of the Freedmen’s Bank, and above all the failure to give the freed people land. Black suffrage replaced it as national policy. Its unfinished work, he says, left a South of peonage, segregation and disfranchisement.

4. III Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others 33 min 10

   Du Bois assesses Booker T. Washington, whose program of industrial education, conciliation of the South and silence on civil and political rights won national acclaim after the 1895 Atlanta speech. He traces earlier Black leadership through revolt, adjustment and self-assertion, from Stono and Nat Turner to Douglass. Washington’s policy, he argues, coincided with disfranchisement, legal inferiority and the decline of Black colleges, and faces a “triple paradox.” Honoring Washington’s real services, Du Bois calls on thinking Black Americans to demand the vote, civic equality and education according to ability, appealing to the Declaration of Independence.

5. IV Of the Meaning of Progress 26 min 4

   Du Bois recalls two summers teaching a country school in the hills of Tennessee while a Fisk student: the hunt for a school, the log schoolhouse, and his pupils and their families, especially the ambitious Josie. Returning ten years later, he finds a new board schoolhouse and some families owning more land, but Josie dead after years of toil and loss, her brother jailed, and others ruined or gone. He asks how progress can be measured among the lowly, and rides back to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.

6. V Of the Wings of Atalanta 23 min 5

   Atlanta, rebuilt after the war as the commercial capital of the New South, becomes a parable through the myth of Atalanta, who lost her race by stooping for golden apples. Du Bois warns that the South, and Black Americans within the Veil, are in danger of making wealth the sole measure of success, as businessmen replace preachers and teachers as leaders. Against this he sets Atlanta University and the ideal of the university as the foundation of all education, arguing that workers and thinkers alike need training, and that the South needs culture as well as wealth.

7. VI Of the Training of Black Men 38 min 6

   Du Bois defends higher education for Black Americans. He traces Southern education since the war: emergency schools, normal schools and colleges training Black teachers, and then industrial schools. The colleges, he argues, were historically necessary, producing thousands of teachers and making Tuskegee possible. Citing the Atlanta study of Black college graduates, mostly teachers, ministers and doctors, he rejects the claim that higher training is wasted, and warns that denying the “Talented Tenth” education will breed demagogues and revolt. The chapter ends with his claim to a life of culture “above the Veil.”

8. VII Of the Black Belt 46 min 8

   Riding south by Jim Crow car, Du Bois brings the reader to Dougherty County, Georgia, in the Black Belt, once “the Egypt of the Confederacy.” He sketches Georgia’s slave history and the seizure of Indian lands, then tours ruined plantations, failed Northern ventures, churches, schools and the cabins of tenants. A few Black farmers own land, but most are trapped by debt, high rents, falling cotton prices, convict labor and exhausted soil. He records their voices, from resignation to bitter anger, and the decay of the old master class.

9. VIII Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece 51 min 15

   Du Bois returns to Dougherty County, Georgia, to study Black farm labor in the cotton belt. Its keynote is debt: emancipation without land left freedmen as sharecroppers and tenants “furnished” by merchants on crop liens, paying inflated credit prices and rack-rents that swallow any gain. He describes crowded one-room cabins, family life strained by poverty, peonage in the back country and laws that hinder migration. He then ranks the people into economic classes, from croppers to the six percent who own land, and shows how many escape only by moving to town.

10. IX Of the Sons of Master and Man 46 min 7

    A survey of how Black and white Southerners meet: in where they live, in work, in politics, in the courts, in schools, in intellectual life and in social life. Segregation means each race sees the worst of the other. The freedmen were left without capital or guidance to the most unscrupulous employers, merchants and lien laws. Disfranchisement leaves them voiceless, and a police system built to control slaves breeds distrust of the courts. The color-line separates even the educated of both races. Prejudice and Black poverty, Du Bois concludes, are each other’s cause and effect, and both must change.

11. X Of the Faith of the Fathers 33 min 7

    Beginning with a backwoods revival, Du Bois names three marks of slave religion: the Preacher, the Music and the Frenzy. He traces the Black church from the African priest and plantation rites through Baptist and Methodist Christianity to a modern institution that is the social, economic and governing center of Black life. Religion that once taught submission turned, with abolition, into a hope of freedom. Today it is caught between Northern radicalism and Southern deception, the “double life” of the Veil, awaiting a new awakening.

12. XI Of the Passing of the First-Born 14 min 4

    Du Bois’s elegy for his son Burghardt, born in 1897 and dead of illness in Atlanta at nineteen months. He recalls the birth, his love for the child and the dread of the Veil that would fall across him, then the ten days of sickness, the death and the funeral, where white passers-by mutter an insult. In grief he finds a bitter comfort, that the boy has escaped a life of humiliation, before hoping for a morning when the Veil is lifted.

13. XII Of Alexander Crummell 23 min 5

    A portrait of the Episcopal priest Alexander Crummell, written as an allegory of three temptations: Hate, Despair and Doubt. Driven from schools by mobs and refused by a seminary and a bishop because he was Black, Crummell builds a struggling congregation and fails. He wanders through England, where he takes a Cambridge degree, and Liberia, and returns to lead his people quietly. Du Bois mourns that the nation hardly knows his name.

14. XIII Of the Coming of John 39 min 6

    A short story. John Jones of Altamaha, Georgia, grows at a Black college from a careless boy into a thoughtful man who now feels the color-line. In New York he is ejected from a concert seat beside the Judge’s son, his white namesake. Home again, he alienates the Black community and is allowed to teach only on the Judge’s terms. When the Judge closes his school and the white John assaults his sister Jennie, John strikes him dead and awaits the lynch mob.

15. XIV Of the Sorrow Songs 24 min 10

    Du Bois explains the Sorrow Songs whose bars head each chapter. He calls the slave songs America’s one original music and recounts how the Port Royal collectors and the Fisk Jubilee Singers made them known. He names ten “master songs”, traces stages from African to Afro-American to blended forms, and reads in their words exile, toil, fear and hope. He closes by asserting Black Americans’ gifts of song, labor and spirit to the nation, and asks whether the songs’ faith in justice is justified.

16. The After-Thought 1 min 1

    A closing prayer addressed to “God the Reader”: that the book not fall still-born into the world, but that a guilty nation of seventy millions may hear its truth and turn toward righteousness and human brotherhood. The prayer breaks off, and the words “The End” complete its last sentence.