“It has been said that a great man lays the world under the obligation to understand him. The obligation is not easily fulfilled when a man of genius of the highest order produces a philosophical interpretation of experience so novel in its design, so subtle in the texture of its thought, so comprehensive in its range and penetrating in its vision. It is impossible to trace the stages in the construction of the system. He made his ‘voyage of discovery’ alone, and we are only made aware of his arrival at his destination. It has been customary to seek and to find the origins of his thought in his immediate predecessors. . . . At best, however, these provide merely clues. . . . The partial and formal similarity of principle does not account for the manner in which the principle was completely transformed. . . . His mind was much too original to remain under their influence; and the easy mastery of their doctrine in his . . . writings shows that he quickly passed beyond them.”1
The above lines, written about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Phenomenology of Spirit, could just as easily have been written about William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk (hereafter, Souls). Ever since the book’s publication, it has simultaneously captivated and confounded readers partly because of the complex and diverse world of ideas that informed its discussions. Classical philosophical concerns appear from the very beginning of the book—in its title. Biblical texts, occasionally paraphrased, make profound statements throughout the Souls. Well-known black writers of the nineteenth century deserve much credit for Du Bois’ accomplishment: his chapter on the Sorrow Songs, for example, recalls Frederick Douglass’s earlier discussion of them, and Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South resonates throughout Souls.2 Nor did Du Bois ignore mainstream scholars. Franz Boas’ turn-of-the-century breakthroughs in cultural anthropology are evident in the book, and the ideas of Du Bois’ Harvard teachers (William James, Albert Bushnell Hart, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana, in particular), and other important thinkers in and around Cambridge, filter into and out of Souls. Also making appearances are a variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French scientists, philosophers, and political and economic theorists and nineteenth-century German materialists, including idealists, Hegel chief among them. Du Bois’ intellectual foundation was broad and deep, and, like Hegel, he mastered the ideas of many of his intellectual forerunners, and he went beyond some of them.
Generations of scholars, from different disciplines and from interdisciplinary areas as well, agree that we would be hard pressed to point to more than a few intellectuals who exceeded the accomplishments of W. E. B. Du Bois. His appropriation of Plato’s Republic in framing his theory of the Talented Tenth is probably flawless. And as a trailblazer in the not-yet-established field of sociology when he undertook and subsequently published his study of black life in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, he was, as Aldon Morris and Amin Ghaziani have written, “a sociologist a century ahead of his discipline.” Du Bois argued then what is now accepted as common knowledge: “that black people were not inferior biologically or culturally; that race was socially constructed; that race, class, and gender inequalities were interdependent and reinforcing; and that worldwide capitalism was the fundamental source of global racism. His work thoroughly integrated multiple methods.” “Yet,” Morris and Ghaziani continue, “Du Bois’s seminal achievements remain understated, at best, given his academic marginality and the discrimination he encountered.”3
Over the course of his long and storied life and career, Du Bois wrote poetry and plays, fiction and nonfiction. Many of his scholarly publications have become intellectual icons. Scholars generally recognize The Philadelphia Negro (1899) as the first major sociological study of race produced in the United States. The Souls of Black Folk is a foundational work in African American and African studies programs worldwide and also influenced the conceptualization of other area studies. The Atlanta University social studies produced under Du Bois’ direction remain important sources for information on early twentieth-century black life. And despite Du Bois’ lack of access to most major archives while researching Black Reconstruction (1935), it remains the most significant book ever produced on the subject; it sits at the foundation of all subsequent studies.
The recent one-hundredth anniversary of some of these achievements provided a perfect opportunity for extensive, critical reexaminations of Du Bois’ work. In addition to celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk in 1999 and 2003, respectively, academics and activists commemorated the centennial of the meeting of the Niagara Conference, which Du Bois initiated, in 2005. Its descendant, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reached that landmark anniversary in 2009. Each of these milestones resulted (worldwide) in special conferences, special sessions at conferences, symposia, new books, articles, and even journals, many of which focused on Du Bois and his work. None of this was undeserved. Du Bois and his work have served the public as symbols of intellectual accomplishment for more than a century.
Although it is true, as Stephen Jay Gould wrote, that “all the world loves a centennial,” this book did not begin as an effort to commemorate any of these important anniversaries.4 Instead, this book evolved from a simple interest in rediscovering The Souls of Black Folk as the major historical icon that it has always been. It has led to this effort to discuss the book as a momentous intellectual accomplishment not only for reasons now well known but for others not yet fully revealed and situated squarely in the era during which Du Bois wrote—when narrow, disciplinary boundaries were not clearly established, and when intellectuals were much more multidimensional than they are now and capable of seeing and addressing many aspects of a point in a variety of ways at once. In the chapters that follow, I hope to re-present The Souls of Black Folk as an even bigger and more important book than has heretofore been demonstrated. I also hope to do justice to a major American intellectual.
I seek, first and foremost, to examine The Souls of Black Folk as one whole, coherent text in which each part, whether an individual chapter or a single idea, though complete itself, relates to the larger story of the whole volume. While paying attention to Du Bois’ discussion of Booker T. Washington, “veils,” “double consciousness,” and “the color line,” I have moved the discussion of Souls significantly away from the heavy (and narrow) emphases that most studies of the book place on them. As important and useful as these topics have been to scholarly analyses of Souls, I see them as the proverbial “trees.” Consequently, here, while not ignoring the significance of these themes in Du Bois’ volume, I have focused on what I see as “the forest”—Soul.
Thus, my second goal is to analyze The Souls of Black Folk, with all of its history, sociology, economics, politics, religion, music, anthropology, and psychology as, equally, a complete work of philosophy.5 After all, the book is about the needs, desires, capacities, and, most important, the striving of the human soul. The other possible conclusion is that Souls is a work of religion, which would not be far from the mark, either, if one should consider religion as more than theology.6 This theme is clearly evident throughout my study, but, even there, my particular interest is in the great potential of reading Souls with more of Du Bois’ formative and formidable training in philosophy in mind.
Reading Souls as a single text rather than a series of compiled essays yielded an unexpected result. It is a particularly risky one. I have, third, proposed reading The Souls of Black Folk in the context of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (hereafter, Phenomenology), which philosophers have described as the most intensely studied work of philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.7 The biggest risk in doing this (beyond my not being a philosopher and the regularly noted difficulty of Phenomenology, even for philosophers) is that there is no proof of a direct relationship between the two texts. As J. B. Baillie reminded us of Hegel, Du Bois “made his ‘voyage of discovery’ alone,” and we can only reflect upon the similarities between Souls and other texts. The closest we can get to “evidence” from Du Bois of a possible relationship between the two texts is an ambiguous statement he wrote during the 1950s to his good friend Herbert Aptheker: “For two years I studied under William James while he was developing pragmatism; under Santayana and his attractive mysticism; and under Royce and his Hegelian idealism. I then found and adopted a philosophy which has served me since; thereafter I turned to the study of history.”8 Most obviously, Du Bois could have been alluding, generally, to Hegel’s influential philosophy of history, which, though published as a book after Hegel’s death, certainly formed the foundation of Phenomenology. But beyond that important concession, most Du Bois scholars have concluded that Hegel does not figure in any significant way in Du Bois’ work. An important exception is Shamoon Zamir, who argued for a direct relationship between Phenomenology and Du Bois’ first chapter of Souls, a conclusion others have made but Zamir detailed. Zamir not only pointed to Phenomenology as a likely focus of Du Bois’ course with Santayana, but also noted that the course Santayana took with Royce the previous year included a significant focus on Phenomenology. This study seeks, then, to add substantively to the works that have acknowledged more than a general influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In particular, I show that we do not need to limit the relationship to one between Phenomenology and the first chapter of Souls, but that it should extend to the whole text.9
Louis Menand has described Hegel’s theory of knowledge as “one of the most grandly architectonic answers to the question, How does the world hang together? ever formulated.” To be sure, no turn-of-the-century student of philosophy could have avoided Hegel or the importance of his work. When Du Bois attended Harvard in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Hegel was at the center of many scholarly discussions and courses. And when Du Bois arrived at the university in Berlin in 1892, the school was under the influence of what others have described as a neo-Hegelian revival. But despite persistent scholarly conclusions that Du Bois’ introduction to Hegel came at Harvard, and perhaps was solidified in Berlin, Du Bois had Hegelian idealism on his mind before either of these life-changing experiences in Massachusetts and Germany. His 1888 Fisk University commencement address on Bismarck, which scholars often point to as evidence of Du Bois’ early fascination with or admiration of German nationalism was, rather, a serious reflection on “the power of purpose, the force of an idea.” The meditation showed “what a man can do if he will.” It was not a totally positive assessment. In Du Bois’ view, Bismarck might have accomplished his goal of making “Germany a nation,” but he created a nation “that knows not the first principle of self government.” In the concluding paragraph of the address, which Du Bois apparently cut from the delivery, he summarized the important result: Bismarck “more than any other is responsible for making Germany a nation of theorists for the vagaries of Lasalle [sic], the pessimism of (Schopenhauer?), and the idealism of Hegel.” Ferdinand Lassalle, often credited with being “the originator of the social-democratic movement in Germany,” was a dedicated Hegelian; he famously adapted Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” discussion to the German working class. And Schopenhauer was anti-Hegelian to an equal degree.10 Hegel’s example, his study of experience and knowledge, the physical and the metaphysical, and the relationship between them provided Du Bois a useful model—a model he encountered before his arrival at Harvard—for creating as complete a study as possible of black folks’ effort to live their own (self-determined) lives.11
In Phenomenology, Hegel began his “system of philosophy” through a study of “the science of the experience of consciousness” and by exploring both the “experience of consciousness” and the “philosophy of spirit.”12 The Platonic concept of World Soul (anima mundi) as the spiritual principle that is the explanation for or the cause of all natural phenomena is central to Hegel’s analysis. World Soul is, itself, a living being, an aspect of everything in the universe; and everything in the universe, though complete in itself, is an interdependent part of World Soul.13 Phenomenology explores the history of the experience of consciousness’s (or Du Bois’ soul’s) striving for freedom in this larger context. As a philosophy of spirit we see soul’s/consciousness’s persistent quest for knowledge. This process begins with conscious’s recognition of an abstract (a particular) condition or factor. Eventually, however, a self-generated doubt (or skepticism) develops that questions whether that abstract object/condition is what it appears to be. Consciousness overcomes this negative through a process of reasoning during which it subsumes the useful parts of the negative and abandons the rest. Thus, consciousness becomes a new thing—what Hegel called the concrete—and has done so in part by recognizing its “other” in itself.14 As consciousness continues to seek greater knowledge, the process begins again and moves, potentially, from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason to spirit. Thus, in each stage of this teleological process, through reflection (reason), consciousness undermines the contradictions between its immediate (determinate) understanding of things (appearances) and what is real. For Hegel, true knowledge (science or philosophy) is achieved when the object as it appears (consciousness) and the object as it actually is coincide. Thus, consciousness must know itself as it actually is, not as it appears. “Absolute Knowledge” represents the highest possible understanding.
Using diverse historical contexts (evidence of “experience”) from the ancient world to the end of the eighteenth century, Hegel’s evidence comes from the histories of peoples he ultimately characterized as world-historical. My contention is that Souls adds black people to Hegel’s queue in a way that makes it clear that the souls of these folks were no different from the souls of others. And, importantly, in the context of Hegel’s (Plato’s) World Soul, the striving of the souls of black folk was not simply comparable to that of Hegel’s other peoples, but was part of the same struggle—the nineteenth-century American part—of Conscious’s (Du Bois’ soul’s) striving for freedom, wholeness, and harmony, and spirit’s quest for knowledge. I suggest here that with The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois did more than write an important and moving history of the postemancipation world in which black Americans lived: his study added the nineteenth century and America to Hegel’s philosophy, via the souls of black folk.15
Recent scholars have speculated on what “a sequel to the [Phenomenology] would look like were Hegel able to complete one.”16 When Hegel published Phenomenology in 1807, America had no history to speak of as a nation. But a century later and a century ago it was possible to add America and the nineteenth century to Hegel’s discussion, and I propose that The Souls of Black Folk accomplished that. The extreme irony in this proposition relates less to Phenomenology and more to Hegel’s subsequent Philosophy of History, which explicitly excluded Africa (black, sub-Saharan Africa) because of an apparent lack “of development [and] culture.” Hegel wrote: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.”17 He recognized that both China and India had old civilizations and culture—visual and performing arts, literature, and poetry. But one had a form of government that inhibited freedom of thought/ideas, and the other was burdened by an “ossified” caste system that equally constrained the development of freedom. It is possible that Hegel would later have recognized, by his own definition, the ways these and/or other areas we now characterize as the new global South crossed “the threshold of world history” just as other groups and places about which he wrote had.18 But what is more important here is what America would look like in this hypothetical study. America finally abolished slavery, one of the existing conditions that kept Africa out of Hegel’s narratives of the philosophy of history, but created a color line that was nearly as effective as slavery at blocking the self-development of a group of its people (and, by extension, World Soul). But when Hegel wrote the lectures that later became part of Philosophy, he left America to “the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.” He insisted that “we have to do with that which (strictly speaking) is neither past nor future, but with that which is, which has an eternal existence—with Reason; and this is quite sufficient to occupy us.”19 At the turn of the twentieth century, America was ripe for commentary in the context of consciousness’s (soul’s) constant striving for freedom/self-determination. But by Hegel’s definition of philosophy, America remained outside the realm of reason. Du Bois’ discussion of the experience of the souls of black folk provides the proof.
Although other scholars have recognized some of the philosophical aspects of Du Bois’ study, acknowledgements of Du Bois’ metaphysics rarely go beyond mentioning it. The general failure of scholars fully to consider Du Bois’ engaging metaphysics has resulted in the most significant misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Souls and a major gap in analyses of it. Because metaphysics, a study of being as being (among other things), depends in part on the acceptance of a priori synthesis (deductive reasoning), and apriorities are anathema to empiricists who rely on a posteriori evidence (inductive reasoning) to explain phenomena, it became far too easy for critics, especially positivists, to treat aspects of Du Bois’ discussion as romantic (sentimental) drivel, or to ignore them altogether. And so, fourth, I have tried to explain and to balance (perhaps to reconcile) the two types of evidence. The Souls of Black Folk is a study of both the material world (phenomena) and the spiritual world (noumena) in which the souls of black folk moved. Explaining both worlds sometimes involved different types of evidence. Du Bois clearly provided both types, and he never confused the two.20
Fifth, throughout this study are both implicit suggestions and explicit appeals for reading Souls as a discussion of the discord between the material and spiritual worlds. The extensive scholarly focus on Du Bois’ discussion of the “double consciousness” of the American Negro—“two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”—has partly obscured the importance of the “two worlds,” often limiting them to a manifestation and discussion of race relations. Both double consciousness and the color line were also aspects (evidence) of the dissonance that existed between the spiritual and material worlds—the inner world of the mind/soul where there was great potential and power, and the external, material world of diverse constraints (the color line among them) that constantly worked against a people’s ability to discover/determine and to become who they “really” are. In this light, an important goal of Souls was to encourage real democracy—a material world that supported the freedom (self-determination) of consciousness (soul) for all its members to and for the good of the whole society—a unity that would reflect (and contribute to) the wholeness and harmony of World Soul.21
My smaller goals are in some ways related to the larger goals noted above and are no less significant. In each chapter in this volume I have attempted to provide new ways of thinking about other aspects of The Souls of Black Folk. My first chapter proposes that, in addition to the traditional characterizations of the three parts of Souls as history, sociology, and spirituality or culture, we would gain much by also seeing these parts as being about work, culture, and liberty—the objectives of the striving of the souls of black folk—and as an adaptation of the Aristotelian triumvirate of appetite or desire, reason or thought, and spirit. The chapter also proposes our seeing these objectives in light of the division between the material and spiritual worlds and as an explicit quest for freedom and liberty. The second chapter offers a new interpretation of Du Bois’ chapter “Of the Coming of John” as a fable that encourages us to think not only about the preeminence of Soul in the book, but of its sovereignty and the importance of respecting and encouraging its striving, with severe consequences for not doing so.
It was The Souls of Black Folk that gave Du Bois’ theory of the Talented Tenth its greatest exposure. Although his whole volume is a substantial commentary on the importance of self-determination, the sovereign right to be whatever one’s aspirations and abilities encourage and allow, Du Bois’ discussions of the Talented Tenth made that case most clearly. Other scholars have noted parallels between Du Bois’ Talented Tenth and Plato’s Philosopher Rulers. In my third chapter, I have illustrated the parallels fully. My interests, however, go beyond that specific illustration. In addition to demonstrating further the utility of connecting Du Bois’ scholarship to his foundational study in philosophy, this chapter shows that Du Bois’ theory of the Talented Tenth was neither elitist nor conservative, which have been the prevailing views until very recently. Instead, it was a thoroughly radical proposition put forth at a time when many thinkers, writers, and activists were proposing alternatives to what people regularly described as a “Gospel of Wealth.”22
My fourth chapter focuses on Du Bois’ chapter on Alexander Crummell. It also begins the shift in my discussion from The Souls of Black Folk as a general work of philosophy rooted, at least in part, in classical philosophical traditions, to one that reveals parallels to Hegel’s Phenomenology. This chapter views Du Bois’ discussion of Crummell as much more than a personal tribute to his mentor, but as both a theological and a philosophical comment on Crummell’s life. Du Bois’ theological representation of Crummell is allegorical: Crummell is a prophet in the tradition of other great religious leaders. But in the philosophical statement that the chapter provides, Crummell also appears to have gone through all of Hegel’s “shapes” (or “forms”) of Consciousness—from perception all the way to Reason and Spirit. Given that metaphysics is closely related to the philosophy of religion, Crummell’s life (he was an Episcopal priest) provided a more fitting example of soul’s journey (spiritual striving) than has been obvious.
Between the Crummell chapter and my fifth chapter on the Sorrow Songs, there is something of a bridge. I have labeled it a “preface” to the fifth chapter. First, this brief description attempts to show that the process Du Bois demonstrated for Crummell (his education from Consciousness to Spirit) is also evident within the group—not just for a few scattered exceptional souls, but the souls of black folk. And so this “bridge” helps to illustrate the collective process, which is important in the Hegelian construct. Second, while briefly sketching out Hegel’s “shapes” of consciousness as they unfold in Phenomenology, this preface reveals parallels in the content and structure of the whole of The Souls of Black Folk and Hegel’s Phenomenology. Third, this discussion introduces and situates Du Bois’ discussion of art (“The Sorrow Songs”) and religion (“Of the Faith of the Fathers”) inside the Hegelian tradition of movement to collective consciousness and toward Absolute Knowledge. And, finally, this preface reveals further (beyond my first two chapters) how uniquely important the final four chapters of The Souls of Black Folk are.
Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of religion in Souls that shows how important black folk religion was to Du Bois and for the souls of black folk. It then moves to a detailed and very different discussion of the Sorrow Songs. To this point, their significance seems limited to their representing black American culture. When combined with Du Bois’ chapter on religion, however, the chapter on the songs completes the Hegelian model, which ends with a focus on the art and religion of the folk. In this chapter I show not only that Du Bois’ chapters on religion and songs parallel Hegel’s discussion of the art and religion of the folk in the creation of collective consciousness, but that Du Bois’ discussion of art—his chapter on the songs—surpasses Hegel’s study in an extraordinary way. Although Hegel’s study challenged Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in many ways, including by allowing for the possibility of Absolute Knowledge among humans, Hegel provided no example of it. Here, I attempt to show that Du Bois’ Sorrow Songs provide evidence of that knowledge.
My chapter on the songs is, in one way, different from most of the other chapters, which stay, as much as possible, focused on the texts of Souls, the two Talented Tenth essays, and/or Phenomenology. In this chapter it was important to go significantly beyond the primary texts and to discuss some of the science of these songs in order to make sense of the contemporary perceptions of the songs and the contexts in which people heard them and to reveal their representation as Absolute Knowledge. Inverting the typical focus of studies of Du Bois’ Sorrow Songs, which usually concentrate on the lyrics—language—this chapter ultimately pays especial attention to the music. It uses elementary aspects of physics and metaphysics to show how Du Bois could legitimately conclude that the Sorrow Songs were both the “articulate message of the slave to the world” (phenomena) and “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation” (noumena).
Du Bois’ claim was bold but totally consistent with his larger discussion, which was both phenomenological and metaphysical. “Spiritual” things (his Sorrow Songs) are presumed to have “characteristics other than those possessed by a natural object.” Such claims for certain music are almost as old as music itself, but efforts to explain what the special characteristics of nineteenth-century black spiritual music were have not been totally successful. The best that nineteenth-century transcribers could do was to try to record the notes on a western (five-line) staff that simply did not have enough space. They also tried to describe the sounds they heard and to explain how the songs made them feel. Recent theorists and critics, in targeting those (and subsequent) descriptions, have, unfortunately, left “the nature of the thing” in this music unidentified. My fifth chapter accepts the nineteenth-century listeners’ words as important description/detail and attempts an interpretation of just what that “spiritual heritage” (“the nature of the thing”) to which Du Bois referred actually was.23
Nine of the fourteen chapters in The Souls of Black Folk began as individual essays published in other places. Some scholars have described Souls as though some of the chapters have little to do with the others.24 Throughout this volume, I have tried to interpret The Souls of Black Folk as one whole, coherent study (to which revisions of the previously published pieces contributed much). Indeed, in my chapter on the songs (and its preface), I offer yet another way of thinking about Souls as a whole. As already noted, most analysts agree that the first part of Souls is driven by the discipline of history, the middle part by sociology, and the last part by discussions of spirituality. I propose in my first chapter that the first part is also about work, the middle part also about culture, and the last part also about liberty. But in chapter 5 and its preface I offer another possible construct, not to confuse but to show again just how profoundly Hegelian The Souls of Black Folk is and how complex Du Bois’ thought was. If we divide Du Bois’ volume differently, as, in fact, he divided it in his “Forethought,” the sections would easily correspond to Hegel’s stages of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, and Spirit. My conclusion shows that the structure of Du Bois’ volume was even more Hegel-like than that.
Composed at a time when the world seemed to be moving backward rather than forward, that is, away from freedom and liberty, wholeness and harmony, Souls was, in some ways, a deeply melancholy lament. It illustrated the revolutionary potential that the Union victory in the Civil War created and that the abandonment of Reconstruction squandered. The loss put America on a tragic course that could and should have been averted. As Du Bois reminded readers early on in his study, “no secure civilization can be built” on a foundation of greed and oppression and the resulting poverty and despair. It is especially important to relate this idea to the powerful and evocative opening lines of Du Bois’ iconic book: the stunning announcement, in 1903, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” In this instance, Du Bois was not talking about a black problem (the so-called “Negro problem”) or even a uniquely American problem. In the context of Hegel’s study of world-historical individuals, events, and peoples, “the problem of the color-line” about which Du Bois prognosticated was the world-historical problem of the century just dawning.25 Given the course of colonialism, imperialism, and extreme forms of nationalism then and subsequently, Du Bois’ statement seems prophetic, in the tradition of the predictions of “seers,” clairvoyants, or even individuals born with a veil.26 But in the tradition of Hegelian phenomenology and metaphysics, Du Bois’ announcement was simply the rational that was real.
Few people have had as many labels placed on them as W. E. B. Du Bois. He has been called an Afrocentrist and a Eurocentrist; a nationalist, a pan-Africanist, and a multiculturalist; an elitist and a champion of the folk; a social democrat and a communist; an integrationist and a segregationist; among many other labels. While at different times Du Bois’ writings surely reflected one or another of these characteristics and sometimes more than one, it is also the case that at all times he was also a philosopher. Probably no work illustrates this more profoundly than The Souls of Black Folk.27
Analyses of The Souls of Black Folk have generally reflected the time and place in which they were produced. As important as it is to consider the relevance of any historical work to subsequent historical moments, much of the confusion about Souls would dissipate if we were to consider more carefully the intellectual environment during which Du Bois wrote. Du Bois was an intellectual, par excellence. And not only did his arrival at Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in 1892 coincide with a European/German revival in interest in Hegel (with one of Hegel’s most devoted followers, whose lectures Du Bois attended, teaching at this university where Hegel himself spent a significant portion of his professional career), but there was an equally important and comparable movement in America that was already generations old, as evinced by the founding of the St. Louis Hegelians in the 1850s, the Harvard/Cambridge based Metaphysical Club (and all its offshoots) beginning in the 1870s, and the Hegel Club in the 1880s, whose membership included some of Du Bois’ Harvard teachers. Du Bois was himself a participant in the Philosophical Club, where primarily Harvard scholars (including a variety of types of Idealists) discussed and debated various philosophical issues/ideas. Adolph Reed has cautioned us that “[s]hoehorning blacks into a chronology of exemplary thinkers is a subspecies of the vindicationist desire to establish the racial presence vis-à-vis a larger intellectual tradition.” It is a fair warning. But, intellectually, Du Bois was no “marginal man,” as E. Franklin Frazier later labeled him. Du Bois (and Souls) was, and should be seen as, at the very center of the intellectual discussions of his day.28
As intellectual historian Stephen G. Hall recently demonstrated for black historians generally, black writers and thinkers at the turn of the century deeply engaged the diverse intellectual discussions of their day, even and especially before they were called historians.29 There is no better exemplar of that intellectual commitment than W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois not only engaged the traditional academic disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature, he also engaged the emerging disciplines of his day, including sociology, psychology, and political economy (versions of which all had previously been aspects of philosophy). He also, less obviously, took on, headfirst, some of the most challenging ideas that were then under debate, including Hegelian idealism. The result, The Souls of Black Folk, was more than a work of history, social science, or literature. The result was also a work of art.30 It is no coincidence that philosophers (Hegel, to be sure) considered art to be among the best and clearest illustrations of the political concerns of a people.
W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Mary Silvina Burghardt and Alfred Du Bois. Although Alfred apparently abandoned the family while Du Bois was a toddler, his mother supported her family, sometimes by working as a domestic. Du Bois attended public schools in Great Barrington, and his ambition was to attend Harvard University after graduating in 1884. After a year of working and the death of his mother in 1885, and with financial help from local people and church groups, he entered Fisk University (1885–88) as a sophomore, pursuing a degree in philosophy. He went from Fisk to Harvard, where he was required to complete a second bachelor’s degree (enrolling as a junior) before beginning graduate work. There, too, he pursued philosophy (B.A., 1890). He received his M.A. degree in 1891 in history and began his Ph.D. work. In 1892, he went to Friedrich Wilhelms Universität (formerly University of Berlin), where he studied until 1894. Unable to secure funding to complete his third year and his doctorate in Germany, he returned to the United States, taught Latin, Greek, German, and English at Wilberforce University (1894–96), completing his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. At Wilberforce, he met Nina Gomer (ca. 1871–1950) whom he married in 1896 and with whom he had two children, Burghardt (1897–99) and Yolande (1900–1961).
Du Bois’ postgraduate career was filled with important political, intellectual, and cultural accomplishments. He moved from Wilberforce to Philadelphia to undertake a study of black life in the city, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania. Upon its completion, he accepted a position at Atlanta University, where he developed the country’s first social science research center, producing sixteen Atlanta University Studies. He served as professor of economics and history there from 1897 to 1910, and during a second stint at Atlanta University (1934–44) he was the founding chair of the Department of Sociology and started the scholarly journal Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture. Du Bois was a founding member of the American Negro Academy (1897), the Niagara Conference (1905) and its offspring, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1909), and he played a leading role in organizing the 1918 Paris meeting of the Pan-African Congress. He founded and edited two more journals, Moon Illustrated Weekly (1905–6) and Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907–10), both organs of the Niagara Movement, and he created the NAACP’s short-lived children’s magazine, The Brownie’s Book (1920–21). But, among his editorial work, Du Bois is best known as the founding editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, which he edited from 1910 until 1934.
It is not possible to separate Du Bois’ political life from his intellectual life, and his early editorial role made it possible to disseminate his views widely. His famous “Close Ranks” statement (1918), urging black Americans to support the war effort, angered some of his closest friends. His subsequent, more pessimistic positions on the likelihood of real racial equality in America cost him his editorship of The Crisis in 1934. By 1950, however, Du Bois’ international associations and travels resulted in the State Department’s charging him with being an agent of a foreign government. The trial that began in 1951 was practically over before it began. The sitting judge quickly dismissed the case certainly because of a lack of evidence but perhaps also to prevent the scheduled appearance of Albert Einstein as a character witness. Still, the State Department refused to validate and return Du Bois’ passport nearly every year between 1952 and 1957. A Supreme Court ruling in 1958 forced its return, whereupon Du Bois embarked on a world tour, spending time in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
In 1961, Du Bois accepted an invitation from President Kwame Nkrumah to come to Ghana to work on his (Du Bois’) lifelong dream project, the Encyclopedia Africana, and he and his second wife, Shirley Graham (1896–1977), whom he married in 1951, departed for Ghana. When, while there, the U.S. embassy refused to renew his passport, Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. Six months later Du Bois died, in August 1963, the night before the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.