The Souls of Black Folk [Paperback]

As to what to do with the black lower class black majority Dubois agrees a lot with his rival Booker T. Washington. However he points out the absurdity of Washington's agreement with white supremacy that little attention should be given to higher education for blacks. Since Washington argued that blacks needed to accumulate wealth as industrial laborers, artisans,, and so on, who was going to give them the vocational education that they needed? White people weren't going to teach them, so they need black teachers trained at all black colleges, Dubois points out. Moreover, Dubois argues in another chapter blacks need education as a forum with which to stimulate their creativity and to articulate their own rich experiences wrought from the fact of being black. If blacks are restricted in developing their intellects or any of the other opportunities to live a constructive life, it will deepen their own resentment against white society and make them turn to anti-social pursuits. The black masses will turn to demagogues. There needs to be a strong professional class ("the talented tenth") that will lead the black community.

Dubois at one point seems to say that if the white capitalist class of the post civil war South would receive for themselves the fruits of higher education that was mostly neglected in the antebellum South, then they might not act so barbarously towards their black laborers. This seems pretty naive. Dubois at one point launches in to a violently flowery tribute to the place where he was teaching at the time, Atlanta University. It is interesting to observe the excessive slightly affected refinement Dubois exudes in this book. Obviously, as is on display in his ending paragraph in chapter six, Dubois took refuge from the barbarousness of American apartheid in the high planes of the European enlightenment.

Another chapter includes an account of Dubois's two years (1886-87) teaching school in a rural village in Western Tennessee. He portrays the struggles of the peasant inhabitants against severe poverty. In a sort of postscript, he comes back ten years later to the village to see what has become of everyone. To take one example. He had been impressed with a young girl named Josie who had an insatiable appetite to learn. Well ten years later Josie was dead from exhaustion at the fruitless debt ridden toil for her family. Her brother had grown angry at his inability to advance in life and taken to petty theft. Other inhabitants had been able to buy more land, though most that were still there were farming away, trapped by the inescapable debt imposed by the white financial elites of the area.

In another chapter he pays tribute to the black abolitionist preacher Alexander Crummel. He writes in a maudlin way about the latter's effort to be a true Christian in the midst of white supremacy in the North. In another, he produces a somewhat tedious sociological analysis of the Black Belt in Georgia. In another he produces a really excellent short story called "Of the Coming of John." The story is about how John, a black from a Georgia village goes away to college for about seven years. At a New York theater, the manager genially asks John to leave and fully refunds his ticket, on the ground of objection to having to sit near John, by a white man who turns out to be an old playmate from the Georgia village. John returns to his village after seven long years of educating himself and thinking about the world. He has grown very intellectual and cold and cynical. This does not please either the blacks or whites of the town, the whites because he has grown uppity as they feared when he left, the blacks because he is so emotionally remote from them.

In another chapter Dubois laments the death of his baby son though speculates that maybe it is good the little fellow didn't grow up to feel the pain of American racism that he himself feels and wishes for escape from.

There are two essays by Dubois attached to this edition of the book. One is "The Conservation of Races" a speech delivered by Dubois to the opening of the Negro Academy in 1897 and "The Development of a People" written in 1904. Dubois seems to exhibit in the first an excessive, though typically bourgeois concern for the allegedly poor morals and financial management of the black lower classes. I understand that he is here preaching self-help and betterment for his racial brethren. However I think he should have spent more time (here and in "Souls") elaborating on the economic oppression that made blacks, and has always made it frustrating for poor people to pursue their dreams. In the "Development of a People," he really cuts deep into white supremacy's claims to superior morality. He notes that the slavery t the Arabs introduced into Africa had the benefit for the slaves in that the latter could become members of the slave-owning household e.g. marrying into it. It was up to the Europeans to introduce slavery based on skin color with all its unspeakable brutalities.

One further notes the importance of this book in that it was written at a time when Booker T. Washington was exercising dictatorial control over black intellectual life...