Work, Culture, and Liberty
John Jones to himself (quoting Esther 4:16), on his way to Altamaha to seek a teaching job from Judge Henderson: “I will go unto the king, which is not according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.”
Judge Henderson to John Jones upon their meeting about the job: “I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger.”—W. E. B. Du Bois1
“HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Du Bois opened his classic volume, The Souls of Black Folk, with these two sentences. They are attention getting; the second sentence is adamant. Du Bois did not speculate on the future’s problems, which most of us, more modest, would have done; he announced, in 1903, that the color line IS the problem of the twentieth century. David Levering Lewis, in his prizewinning biography of Du Bois, concludes, “This problem [of the color line] is the leitmotif of the book, a problem Du Bois examined from the perspective of institutions and ideals, and from that of the educated, the ignorant, the rural hard-pressed, and the urban beleaguered.”2
But in lines as famous (and as often quoted) as the reference to the color line, Du Bois also wrote:
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a 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.
Arnold Rampersad’s literary biography of Du Bois describes “the Veil” as “the central metaphor both of black existence and of the book.” And literary theorist and critic Eric Sundquist concludes that the description of double consciousness is “the most famous idea advanced by Du Bois, perhaps the most famous advanced by any African American.” Political scientist and theorist Adolph Reed Jr. describes double consciousness as “a distinctly attractive template for the articulation of both interpretive and substantive, academic and hortatory arguments concerning the race’s status.”3
Du Bois’ remarks about the veil, the color line, and double consciousness captured, and for more than one hundred years have continued to hold, scholarly and popular attention.4 The attention is not unwarranted. To have written with such insight and passion about the color line, practically at the point of its (post–Civil War) institutionalization, was a major accomplishment; the veil was both a powerful metaphor and an important symbol in African American culture; and the concept of double consciousness seemed to capture the way black people lived their lives.5 Nevertheless, by putting them back into the context of the whole book, this chapter shifts the focus from double consciousness, the veil, and the color line to other, perhaps more important but grossly under analyzed, aspects of the book.6
Just a few lines after that “gentle” but dramatic statement about the color line in the forethought to The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois stated his purpose: “I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.”7 Since Du Bois was as much a philosopher as a historian, political economist, and sociologist, his wording should alert us that his description of the material world (the color line), despite its vividness, was merely a vehicle for illustrating a larger point. The phrase “spiritual world” suggests an interest in the incorporeal, however closely related it might be to the physical world. Du Bois was, after all, writing about “the striving in the souls of black folk” (emphasis added). The veil was undoubtedly central to the discussion, but Du Bois was a careful writer, and his reference to a “veil” obligates our looking through it, rather than at it, for the larger significance of this book.
The “veil” that is internal to the black community served as an allusion to, and/or a metaphor for, what people in a community had the ambition, the potential, indeed the ability, to achieve. In the African American folk tradition, one who is born with a veil is alleged to have the ability to see, feel, and understand things that ordinary people cannot. And many who report having been born with a veil note the predictive/prophetic quality of their dreams. Thus, people born with a veil have greater potential than others.8
But beyond that veil (“in this American world”) existed a formidable barrier to the fulfillment of that ambition and ability—the color line. The color line did more than separate the two “races,” keeping each to its own side. It had the effect of reaching within the veil, into the souls of black folk. At the end of the first chapter, which is called, significantly, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois outlined the book, and he identified the primary objectives of African American striving when he wrote, “Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people.” Historian Thomas C. Holt has written that Du Bois recognized “work, culture, liberty,” as the basis of all people’s “effort to live a morally satisfying and useful life.”9 But more than that, to understand African Americans’ striving for work, culture, and liberty is to see their souls—to see through the veil. To deny the striving, to stunt the ability, potential, and ambition that resided in the souls of black folk, would be devastating both for those who were striving and those who tried to suppress it.
Despite the enduring importance of The Souls of Black Folk, and the extensive appropriation of concepts it incorporated, it is still not possible to take for granted the meaning of expressions it popularized. In Stanley Brodwin’s pioneering and compelling interpretation of the book, he wrote: “Du Bois presents an intensely personal vision of how one man confronted and transcended the complex tragic life generated in living behind the veil of the color line” (emphasis added).10 To be sure, Du Bois lived much of his life behind both the veil and the color line. But the veil was more than the color line. Wilson Moses has written that the veil was a metaphor for black skin, and Du Bois, indeed, used “the veil” as a synonym for race.11 But it was not in that sense that he invoked the metaphor. To find the metaphor, we should think about the veil that is, literally, a caul—the membrane (a “skin”) that encloses a fetus in the womb, part of which still covers the head of some babies at birth—and apply the traditional understanding of its significance: people born with a veil are said to possess special gifts—of prophecy, of “second sight,” of clairvoyance. The metaphor occurs, then, in the application of the veil as a symbol of black ability or potential.12
Where Du Bois’ veil was a synonym for the term “race,” he could allow us to peer “behind the veil” (behind the facade of skin), where we would see black people’s souls. He, and others, could “dwell above the veil” (the color line) in a space where color was irrelevant, perhaps even nonexistent, where only ability mattered. And he could even show us the impact of the “shadow of the veil” (emphasis added), which was not the veil at all, but the color line that seemed to follow black folk everywhere they went, even to the grave.13 And so it is within the literal veil, behind black skin, that we must look to see what is most important in this volume. Within (or behind) the most obvious indication of “race,” and simultaneously in the realm of the metaphor, lay the source of African American striving—the soul—and black potential. The color line, which Du Bois sometimes called “color prejudice,” was the external, artificial construction that obstructed black folks’ striving so thoroughly and consistently that it had the ability to damage their souls by destroying that potential.
If one holds to these simple, and perhaps obvious, distinctions between the color line and the veil, Du Bois’ writing becomes less ambiguous, eliminating the need for rewriting and/or extrapolation, which occurred in Robert Gooding-Williams’s insightful interpretation of The Souls of Black Folk as an example of philosophy of history. Gooding-Williams chose to read Du Bois’ powerful statement about black “second-sight in this American world” as “second-sight into this American world.” In this context, second sight became the source of a problem. It caused black folk to “see things as the white world sees them, but only at the price of self-estrangement.” Black people became “other” to themselves, and, consequently, according to Gooding-Williams, “Du Bois argues that the Negro internalizes the opposition between a white world and a Negro world.”14 Second sight, the internal condition, was not the problem; second sight was, in fact, empowering. The “American world,” with its color line, was the source of the problem. Black skin represented a barrier only if one refused (or was unable) to see behind it (behind it, if looking at black people, as many white people did). But even under those circumstances, the veil (whether speaking of color or “second sight”) was not the source of chaos or confusion, which, according to many, is the nature of double consciousness. Rather, strife arose out of the impact of the artificial external barrier that was the color line, because it regularly impeded black efforts for individual and group development. The material consequence of being unable to vote, go to school, own land, and/or earn a living wage was, obviously, poverty. But the most deadly consequence of the color line was spiritual; it could cause black folk to cease striving.15 Du Bois clearly understood that, unimpeded, some folks’ striving would result in success; for others it might not; and some would not strive at all. But in any case, “striving” (not its outcome) was what mattered to Du Bois.16 At the very least, striving suggested a soul that was intact. Du Bois argued for the preservation (the “conservation”) of that soul in its striving for work, culture, and liberty.
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Academics usually divide The Souls of Black Folk into three sections. In this division, they say chapters 1 through 3 provide historical background and context. Chapters 4 through 9 provide sociological analyses. And chapters 10 through 14, focus on spirituality.17 But using that same outline, one can just as easily argue that the first section provides a focus on work, the middle section focuses on culture, and the last section focuses on liberty. What follows are detailed discussions about both frameworks. The goal here is to provide an overview of Du Bois’ seminal work while also illustrating the usefulness of viewing its parts differently from how we are accustomed to seeing them. Ultimately, this different emphasis reveals more clearly the objectives of the striving in the souls of black folk.
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the first chapter of the book, introduces readers to the veil, the color line, double consciousness, and to each of the chapters that follow it. It provides a clear introduction to the struggle for work, culture, and liberty as well, and an introduction to some of the difficulties, all related to the color line, in attaining or enhancing those conditions. Although it is most common to see the examples Du Bois presented as evidence of “double aims” or as evidence of his interest in culture, his examples also describe stunted aspirations in different areas of work. Artisans, the first example he provides, were caught between the contradictory aims of black and white America and, consequently, were unable to improve their skills. The examples of the artist and the intellectual (“the would-be black savant”) make an additional comment about culture, but they, like the artisans and professionals (ministers and physicians), were also stifled in the execution of their vocations.18 Du Bois went into much more detail in this introductory chapter when he talked about “liberty,” which he described as “the single refrain of the bondspeople throughout their enslavement.” Yet, he added, forty years after emancipation, “the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.” Freedpeople had sought their freedom through the vote—the Fifteenth Amendment—but, Du Bois concluded, it only “partially endowed” them. They also sought “book learning,” but education left the goal unrealized as well. And when African Americans began to doubt their own worthiness, white America reinforced the doubt about black striving for work, culture, and liberty, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the Black man’s ballot, by force or fraud.
Du Bois insisted, however, that black efforts had not been wrong. Instead, he said,
each alone was over-simple and incomplete. . . . To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people.
To Du Bois, “that vaster ideal” concerned “human brotherhood.” He predicted that “the Negro Problem” would be the “concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic.” Then he moved on, “with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.”
As most scholars have concluded, chapters 2 (“Of the Dawn of Freedom”) and 3 (“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”) form the core of the historical chapters. In them, we learn about the war years, the early postwar years, and the first postemancipation generation. Du Bois documented slaves’ pre-proclamation movements toward Union lines and thus toward freeing themselves, the process of creating the Freedmen’s Bureau to organize and enhance emancipation efforts, and the passage of constitutional amendments designed to establish citizenship more emphatically and to protect it. Through military policy, legislative enactments, and new government agencies, the federal government made freedpeople “the ward of the nation.” But in the end, federal officials dismantled the Freedmen’s Bureau and withdrew the federal troops from the South, and, ultimately, black people not only remained unfree but also unprotected. Black men lost the vote; black people lost legal and civil status and lost support for their schools. In that context, Booker T. Washington’s proposals for vocational education and the acceptance of political and social subordination won such support that “it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.” Often read and interpreted solely as an attack on Washington and the influence he had by the turn of the century, or as a critique of black leadership generally, Du Bois’ third chapter also neatly continues/concludes the larger historical discussion of winning, and then losing, freedom.19
Du Bois’ critique of Washington’s ideas first appeared in print in a 1901 review of Up from Slavery, before the disagreement between the two men was clearly established. “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” the third chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, however, came to symbolize the apex of that debate. Because of the timing of the publication of the original essay, that is because of its historical context, we have failed to see its subsequent literary context—the relationship between the discussion of Washington and the rest of the book in which it later appeared. In this literary context, the chapter does not deserve so prominent a role (over all the other chapters), but an equal one for its contribution to the entire narrative.20 The chapter on Washington is an important part of the history of the black American experience after the Civil War.
The history in chapters 2 and 3 seems broad and general. And it is, undoubtedly, a history of emancipation and its demise. But within this discussion of the development and abandonment of the emancipation and Reconstruction projects is an equally detailed and very important discussion of the first fifty years of free black labor. In fact, one can only view Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction as his real contribution to the analysis of black labor if one ignores that Souls, in its entirety and especially in the first chapters, was the first systematic examination of postemancipation black labor.
Du Bois first established that emancipation resulted in “a labor problem of vast dimensions.” He followed slaves and ex-slaves from their crossing Union lines and being labeled contraband to their being put to work as “military resources.” He explored freedpeople’s participation in experimental labor arrangements such as those in Maryland, Louisiana, and most notably at Port Royal, designed to make “free working men out of slaves.” He looked at the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which grew out of an interest in transforming the “‘emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary industry.’” Bureau agents moved tens of thousands of freedpeople from the towns to the country—“back to the critical trial of a new way of working.” Du Bois believed that the ultimate success of the bureau “lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work.” They understood, as he noted, that their labor was their capital. And so while Freedmen’s Bureau commissioners established schools and hospitals and solemnized marriages, they also drew up labor contracts and mediated labor disputes. So much of the bureau’s work involved the protection of freedpeople’s right “to choose their employers,” to negotiate their wages, and to be free from “peonage or forced labor” that Du Bois could easily conclude that the agency, “[i]n truth, . . . became a vast labor bureau.” And when it died, rural black folk became peons, “bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death and the penitentiary,” and black urban dwellers became “a segregated servile caste.” Because, as Du Bois had just noted, “not a single southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away,” freedpeople now had no place to turn.
Although Du Bois’ third chapter on Booker T. Washington might very well be, as David L. Lewis wrote, “the manifesto of the Talented Tenth,” Du Bois’ turn to Washington and the early twentieth century also, importantly, completed the discussion of the first fifty years of “free” black labor. In this careful but pointed critique of Washington’s program, Du Bois charged Washington with creating “a Gospel of Work and Money.” Du Bois insisted that black people should have the same rights as whites to choose their line of work and to acquire the necessary education to perform that work, and they were entitled to the legal/political means to protect their work. Finally, he charged that Washington’s program prepared black people for a lifetime of “industrial slavery and civic death” and a permanent “position of inferiority”21 Freedpeople were losing their struggle for land and public schools, their civil and political rights, and much of their ability to work as truly free laborers before white America designated Booker T. Washington a leader. Du Bois, however, noted that this anointing changed “a by-path”—the relinquishing of civil and political rights, which Du Bois did not at first oppose as a temporary (and selective) measure—“into a veritable way of life,” which he did oppose. Perhaps also, Du Bois remembered from his undergraduate, classical education that in ancient Greece, free men pursued the liberal arts, and slaves pursued the mechanical arts.
The chapters of the middle section, typically described as the sociological analysis, illustrate the way of life that troubled Du Bois so much. “Of the Meaning of Progress,” for example, relays the extraordinary obstacles that ordinary people with “an ambition to live ‘like folks’” faced in their effort to do so. They struggled for schooling, for wages, for land, and for what, ultimately, ought already to have been theirs—opportunity. But their lives were characterized by roughhewn houses, small farms that “the ‘white folks would [eventually] get,’” children with the responsibilities of adults, and schools unable to offer them enough. The urban middle class, though materially better off, did not give Du Bois more hope. Rather than reinforce the then-current tendency to analogize the city of Atlanta and the legendary Phoenix, “Of the Wings of Atalanta” offered a chilling warning to the city of Atlanta (and the nation) in the example of Atalanta’s fate. In the postwar period, Atlanta did rise from the ashes, in a manner of speaking, but in the process, the merchant “dethroned the planter,” and “work and wealth” became “the mighty levers to lift this old new land.” Such dreams, of material prosperity alone, led to the creation of “vulgar money-getters” and lives of “pretence and ostentation.” Du Bois warned readers that “Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success,” for at risk was the lesson in the tale of Atalanta, which unlike the tale of the Phoenix, was tragic rather than triumphant. Atalanta lost her legendary race because of her desire for golden apples.22
This chapter on Atlanta is, undoubtedly, a lament. Du Bois wrote, “the old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into their places are pushing . . . all those with property and money.” Du Bois was not merely whining, as others have argued, because black people of his class were losing or had lost their status. Instead, the discussion reflected concern that their loss of status symbolized the loss of old and, to Du Bois, valuable ideals. Here, the preacher and the teacher were much more than displaced members of the “Talented Tenth.”23 They represented spirituality and knowledge. Preachers and teachers, churches and schools, religion and education, had historically served as significant participants in, examples and objectives of, African American striving. Thus Du Bois undoubtedly feared he was witnessing a shift in cultural values “from a strife of righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life.” The striving “to live ‘like folks’” that he so lovingly detailed for Josie and her family in chapter 4 as an elegant, even if unfulfilled (and often futile), effort, was being replaced by a quest for “golden apples.” And as was the case for Atalanta, such would be the demise of Atlanta and of black folk.
Du Bois complained that with the rise of industrial capitalism in the New South, people came to assume that it was right and normal to aim simply to be rich. He worried that black people (of the “middle class” in particular) were succumbing to this culture of acquisition, and so he suggested how education could arrest this development. Du Bois hoped that the black university would resist the emphasis on “bread-winning” and instead “be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.” The schools should “teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think. . . . And the final product of [their] training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.” The South would have to do better in educating both black and white folk if it aimed to “catch up with civilization.” But Josie and her family, in the chapter that begins the middle section of the book, symbolized the struggle black folk faced in the meantime. They had no real chance to live “like folks” despite their striving, because children had to work rather than go to school since their parents could rarely earn enough to support the family. And working (even hard work) did not ensure advancement. Josie’s brothers were among many who had their wages stolen by crooked white employers and a complicit and corrupt legal system. Even when people worked their own land, they were always aware of the possibility that “‘white folks would get it all.’” Virtually all interracial contact had become negative, and young people in particular seemed set up for a lifetime of “crime and listlessness.” It was a pervasive, destructive culture in which even Josie, who merely longed to learn, ultimately worked (and grieved) herself to death.
These middle chapters, on work, family, class, schooling, and interracial relations, are undoubtedly sociological in their subjects and in their method of looking at the conditions black southerners faced after the abandonment of Reconstruction. But it is the substance of the chapters, an extended discussion of the culture of the New South, that is the glue. In the middle of Souls, Du Bois carefully illustrated not only how people lived (the social institutions and thus the sociology of the South) but what they learned through living—the broad, anthropological conceptualization of culture.24 If one looks at what he described in these chapters with this idea in mind, his concerns about the culture of the New South and the souls of black folk are easy to comprehend. The “reconstructed” white South ruthlessly (and thoughtlessly) exploited both human and natural resources. Consequently, the Black Belt, where most black workers lived, had become a land of “rack-rented tenant[s],” and the White Belt, Du Bois’ metaphor for where most of the cotton now grew, had taken on the appearance of what would later be characterized as a postindustrial town—its factories and farms abandoned, fields and lawns overgrown. Government refusal to fund education equitably sent a powerful negative message about the importance of schooling for black people. And if voting had ever been a way to change things, in this context the only vote that seemed to count was one that was bought. Black folk were regularly incarcerated not for crimes but to create an unwaged labor force.25 Black striving regularly led to debt; land ownership was nearly impossible; and, often, black people, young and old alike, could choose only between crime and poverty.26 Ultimately, in the cities, where only money seemed to matter, people learned that wealth, rather than character, led to influence. And in the country, where work rarely improved one’s circumstances, people became “careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful; . . . improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintances get on about as well as the provident.” The South did not ask much of its black brethren, and upon receiving little, responded with ridicule. Du Bois worried about the confusion that could easily result from this paradox. He worried about the souls of black folk.
Scholars have devoted considerable energy to contextualizing Du Bois’ use of the term “folk” at the expense, I think, of accounting for his use of “soul.”27 If the “veil,” as an allusion both to “race” and to the great potential of the folk, resonated with Du Bois’ black readers, the idea of “souls” must have had equal power considering its religious connotations. After all, in religious contexts, all souls are equal. But it is the philosophical meaning that matters here, and, importantly, it reinforces the symbolism of the veil. A turn-of-the-century philosopher would have understood that “[t]o speak of soul is to speak of a capacity or propensity to function in a certain way . . . or it is to speak of the actual exercise of such a capacity.” And if “soul” represented “spirit in potentia” to a philosopher, “spirit” represented “the developed energy of the soul”—the actualization of potential. Thus, as already noted, Du Bois’ calling his first chapter “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” spoke directly and substantially to his philosophical concerns about the souls of black folk. In fact, although Du Bois had moved from philosophy as a formal area of study as a Fisk University and Harvard University undergraduate more squarely into the disciplines of history, political economy, sociology, and psychology at Harvard and in Berlin, he had good reason to hold on to some of some of the foundational philosophical ideas of Aristotle (and Plato and Socrates, for that matter) because they all held that “soul is virtually the principle of all life.” Socrates insisted, therefore, that the soul required great care. It was the soul, according to Plato, that enabled “‘forms’ to enter the world of becoming.” Aristotle reiterated that “the body is the instrument . . . of the soul.”28
The final section of the book provides several detailed, if sometimes metaphorical, examinations of Soul. It begins with a study of the evolution of black religion and ends with a discussion of spirituals. As these two chapters, and the ones between them, are about religion, faith, fierce personal struggles, death, and dying, it is not surprising that most scholars see them, collectively, as being about spirituality, which they are. But here we should look at these chapters as examples of “spiritual striving” (Soul’s effort to fulfill itself; these individuals’ efforts to become what they have the ambition and potential to become) and consider what they say about liberty.
“Of the Faith of the Fathers” describes how slaves, who faced discouragement and disrespect for their religious traditions, assumed a persona other than their own, becoming, outwardly, at least, Christians. That chapter should not be read so narrowly, however, for Du Bois used this “deception” to illustrate much more than religion. In life in general, he argued,
the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage.
Du Bois had suggested in earlier chapters that it was only through deception that black people gained the “right to share modern culture.” Consequently, and in conclusion, he wrote, “The price of culture is a Lie.”
And so, this conclusion to the middle section (“Of the Faith of the Fathers”) continues the discussion of how the southern way of life could cost black folk more than votes, land, crops, houses, schools, and wages. It could cost their identity—their self-consciousness—their soul, their humanity.29 While forcefully reinforcing the implications of the earlier chapters in the middle section, the chapter on religion nevertheless provides a hint of hope. Du Bois believed that the (sometimes-disinterested) congregants in some of the churches he described still harbored “the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.” Chapters 11 through 14 suggest the different directions that “ideal” might take. In some ways, they represent “case studies” on the prospects for liberty.
“Of the Passing of the First Born” is particularly pessimistic. Du Bois evinced anguish over the loss of this young life, his son. Yet he writes: “Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil!” Du Bois understood the constraints that his son would have faced and was ultimately unable to see his being free except in death. Still, Du Bois expected (again alluding to work, culture, and liberty) that “some mighty morning” would “lift the Veil and set the prisoned free,” that on that morning men would “ask of the workman, not ‘Is he white?’ but ‘Can he work?’ [And ] . . . ask artists, not ‘Are they black?’ but ‘Do they know?’” Clearly, that day had not yet arrived, but the next chapter, on Alexander Crummell, indicates that some might nevertheless manage to prevail.
Chapter 11 is undoubtedly a celebration of Crummell’s life and accomplishments, but, more important, it is a forceful example of the potential of the color line to destroy human striving. Despite Crummell’s tremendous abilities, his life was characterized by a series of “temptations” that not only threatened his ability to develop himself fully and use his gifts to improve the world, they also threatened to destroy his soul. As was the case in the example of John Jones, Crummell’s sense of wholeness was based on the ability to carry out his commitment to striving. Crummell first faced racism as he was growing up during the slavery era. As he grew up and outgrew the schools that were available to black youths locally, he had to travel great distances to continue his education. Local residents tore down one of the schools he entered because of their objection to integrated education. Later, an Episcopal seminary refused to admit him because he was black. After receiving training elsewhere, he turned down an assignment to a Philadelphia church upon learning that neither he nor his congregants could attend the church conventions. After preaching for a time in New York, Crummell left for England in despair. Hanging on to his soul’s striving, Crummell completed his studies at Queens’ College (Cambridge), went to Africa, where he worked for most of the next twenty years, returned to America, and, over the course of his life, made a tremendous contribution to the world. Even though he died a stranger in his own land (which Du Bois saw as a tragedy), Crummell ultimately won what is now famously viewed as the war of the two unreconciled strivings.
The main subject of chapter 13 seems, on the surface, not to have fared so well. In “Of the Coming of John,” there are two Johns—childhood playmates—one white, one black. In an allusion to ideas introduced in chapter 6 (“Of the Training of Black Men”), John Henderson’s father, a judge, saw a bright future for his son, a Princeton graduate, but for John Jones, who graduated from Wells Institute, the judge only saw the ruin of a good boy. Neither graduate wanted to return to Altamaha after his schooling, but Jones returned home after a racist encounter at a New York opera production, which, prophetically, involved his former playmate. Although Jones became one of those “brooding” black men that Du Bois had foreshadowed, after a period of readjustment, Jones threw himself into his teaching and began to see some results. For his hard work, the judge fired him. As he left the school, John Jones came upon his former playmate (Henderson) in the process of assaulting his (Jones’s) sister, Jennie.30 Instinctively, Jones hit Henderson with a tree limb, killing him. After saying goodbye to his mother, John returned to the site of the assaults and waited for the lynch mob, led by the judge. The depravity that enabled (even encouraged) Henderson’s assault on Jennie simultaneously fueled John Jones’s contempt, and the two deaths proved that the color line designed by whites to restrain or destroy black people’s striving could ultimately destroy them, too.31
An adequate interpretation of the four final chapters of The Souls of Black Folk has eluded some of the best students of Du Bois’ work. Like most scholars who conclude that the chapters focus on spirituality, Shamoon Zamir sees them as “concerned primarily with religious culture.” Eric Sundquist, who accepted Du Bois’ understated characterization of them as discussions of “life within the veil,” concluded that Du Bois’ including them “was not so provocative a cultural act as was the featuring of the spirituals at the head of each chapter.”32 But in fact, the final chapters—they were new—reflect Du Bois’ thinking on liberty, the potential for black folks’ achieving it, and potential consequences should they not. And as such they are tremendously provocative.
Du Bois’ concern with liberty is evident from the introductory chapter (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”) of the book, where he wrote:
[F]ew men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro. . . . To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O Children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Du Bois went on to describe the first postemancipation decade as an extended, and ultimately only partly successful, search for freedom. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but, Du Bois acknowledged, “the ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means.” He believed the Fifteenth Amendment provided those means. And in an important sentence about the freedpeople, one that also clearly differentiated between freedom and liberty, Du Bois wrote, “The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him” (emphases added). There is no way to know exactly what Du Bois meant in his use of these two terms, “freedom” and “liberty.” To be sure, we could consider them in the context of the Constitution and the politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to which Du Bois would eventually devote a major book. But here there is good reason to consider them in the context of the American Revolutionary rhetoric.
Du Bois ended each of the first three “history” chapters with direct references to the Revolutionary Era. Near the end of the first chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” he pointed out that, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” Then he closed the chapter saying:
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
Chapter 2, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” focusing on the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau, concludes:
For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South, the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life.
The third chapter, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” concludes even more pointedly.
By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Du Bois could not have linked his discussion of the plight of black Americans in the post–Civil War period to a more important discourse than the one that underpinned America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence spoke of “rights” and was, as Jacob Needleman recently demonstrated, more than a “political statement” but a “metaphysical claim” related to “the nature of the human self and our place in the universal world.”33 By linking his discussion not only to the Revolutionary Era, generally, but to the Declaration of Independence, specifically, Du Bois was able to develop and sustain a complex discussion of freedom and liberty.
Freedom, as Du Bois described it, certainly involved the absence of bondage. And the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States and established constitutional freedom for all the nearly 4 million former slaves.34 But since the Revolutionary leaders were already, technically, free men at the time of their revolt, that is to say, not literal slaves, they must have meant something more in their discussions of freedom, they included civil and political rights—citizenship. “Slavery” for these already-free men related to their status as subjects of the British Crown. And voting was the necessary but missing mechanism for their consenting to the acts of government.35 Thus, the ballot (the Fifteenth Amendment) served as an important symbol or “visible sign of freedom” for Du Bois because voting was an indication of citizenship, and it prevented the imposition of the arbitrary will of others imposed through the government. Free (self-determining) men had to be able to vote. And voting did more than demonstrate the absence of slavery, it established a political relationship between men and their government.
But the Revolutionary and Civil War eras were necessarily and dramatically different. The colonists had sought to and had succeeded in abolishing their relationship with an existing government and creating a new one whose powers, experience taught, they should actively seek to limit. They did so not only by putting power in the hands of voters, but, perhaps even more important, they used the new Constitution to invest a substantial amount of power in state governments at the expense of the new national government. By contrast, freedpeople relished their new post–Civil War political relationship with the national government. Despite the fact that the new (post-Revolutionary) national government had protected slavery, allowed the continuance of the international slave trade (for twenty more years), and gave the South an inordinate amount of political power in this new national government by counting three-fifths of its slaves in apportioning representation, in the 1860s, it was this central power that emancipated and enfranchised black Americans. Moreover, it was state governments and officials who, after the collapse of Reconstruction, disfranchised the overwhelming majority of these black men, destroying the political relationship that the Union victory in the war had created.
The creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau had, however, initiated an important new political relationship. And when, in 1866, over two presidential vetoes, Congress granted the Freedmen’s Bureau two additional years of life, according to Du Bois,
[t]he government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. . . . It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends.
He described the bureau as a government, “for a government it really was.” As long as it lived, the Freedmen’s Bureau—the body designated to maintain and protect black freedom—represented the institutionalized relationship between freedpeople and their government.
But the federal government allowed the Freedmen’s Bureau to die. And by the time The Souls of Black Folk appeared in print southern black men had lost the vote, and the Supreme Court had approved, twice, the elimination of the access that the Constitution supposedly guaranteed to black Americans.36 Thus, the potential for an important, positive, political relationship with any government was gone. These men and women were, however, still technically free, and so a more compelling case about the perverse and abusive relationship then existing between black citizens and their (local/state/national) governments could not have been made than the one provided by Du Bois’ extensive appropriation of the Declaration of Independence.37 Moreover, the Declaration of Independence made the case for an already-free citizenry’s ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
Du Bois’ discussion of freedom and liberty in the context of the Declaration of Independence is sometimes hidden in plain view. When he complained about the post-Reconstruction conditions, for example, he noted:
Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North; not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the nation.
It was no coincidence that Du Bois used the expression “Common Sense,” or that he capitalized it. Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet of the same name held that “Common sense will tell us that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us is, of all others, the most improper to defend us.”38 Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, an especially antimonarchy polemic, was, however, also a powerful defense of individual freedom.39
In Revolutionary America, “liberty” was, however, a rather imprecise term with both materialistic and philosophical implications. In the most materialistic sense, its connection to individual civil and property rights was paramount, and this was not lost on Du Bois. He devoted a substantial portion of Souls to discussing black people’s struggle for and loss of these rights. But perhaps even more important, a philosopher pondering the idea of republicanism, as Du Bois did from the very beginning of this book, would have found it difficult not to see liberty at its heart. And for such a person, perhaps for any classicist, liberty not only depended upon civic participation, which presumably accompanies freedom, but demanded the protection of the group in their efforts to realize collective ambitions. Scholars have recently described republican liberty in terms of “civic humanism” and characterized it, in part, as a society’s respect for the values, abilities, and accomplishments of its members. Liberty related to a “social order” that supported a person’s ability “to be what he is.” And in this context, “property” was not real estate, but “what . . . comes into being when man functions in the world.” Thus, if freedom signified the relationship between men and their government, liberty concerned the relationships between and among men.40
Du Bois illustrated the lack of productive interaction between black and white men in great detail in the middle section of the book, as indicated above. “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” which began with a statement about the then-current rage of imperialism, and the “war, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery” that resulted from “carrying civilization and the blessed gospel” around the world, also made it clear that one did not need to travel so far to see these results. As Du Bois put it, “we have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords.” His commentary in that chapter focused on what he saw as the main areas of intimate social contact: residency, economics, politics, intellect, everyday life, and religion. Du Bois saw these as the “principle ways in which men living in the same communities are brought into contact with each other,” the diverse ways in which “the black race in the South meet and mingle with the whites.” Unfortunately, he found no support for or encouragement and protection of black people’s aspirations in any of these areas of life. Where a people could not live as free people should have been able to live, one can hardly say they experienced liberty. But, as Kwaku Korang has written about the historical and sociological chapters in Souls, “‘American Civilization’ [was] on trial” with Lady “Liberty” serving as the presiding judge. Carrying the metaphor to its logical end, “the plaintiff is the Negro,” and all of America, “We the people,” serve as jury.41
In going beyond freedom—to liberty—in his discussion, Du Bois recognized the importance of political and social objectives, civil rights and social relations, individual and collective potential. In focusing on the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, he also highlighted an important philosophical discussion simultaneously taking place in the book, one that distinguished between the individualistic, positive law of the Constitution and the collective, natural law of the Declaration.42 And in this light, the final chapters of his book turn out to be perhaps the most provocative chapters of the book as they transform civic humanism’s ideal of liberty from the abstract (of the middle, sociological, chapters) to the real or concrete.
It was, in Du Bois’ view, the absence of civic humanist liberty that led to the death of his child in “Of the Passing of the First Born.” It was the prospect of the same lack of liberty for the child that led Du Bois sadly to celebrate the death. The chapter suggests resignation to the prevailing conditions. But in the next chapter, we see that Alexander Crummell, a quasi-expatriate, lived his life fully, succumbing neither to the double consciousness described in Du Bois’ first chapter nor to living “the Lie” described in his tenth. Crummell successfully resisted the corrupting culture and limitations that white America placed on his capabilities. He held fast to his ambitions. John Jones, on the other hand, represented the worst possible outcome (if read in a traditional way) for those who remained in the American South and aspired to similar heights without any real possibility for achieving them. Equally important, thwarting Jones’s ambitions also created the worst possible outcome for those responsible for frustrating the fulfillment of his potential.
There was, however, one more possible outcome. It existed in the example of the Sorrow Songs. This final chapter of the book is most obviously an analysis of the spirituals, and, therefore, it is an example of (religion-related) spirituality. But the chapter on the songs serves, equally, as a compelling conclusion to the “case studies” on liberty. In his chapter on the songs, and especially in one particular passage, Du Bois drew the three preceding chapters (the “case studies”) together. He wrote:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. . . . Sometimes it is faith in life [Crummell?], sometimes a faith in death [the first born?], sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond [John Jones?]. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls [their striving] and not by their skins [the veil].
As far removed as the Sorrow Songs might seem from notions of liberty, here, Du Bois brought his readers to the full classical understanding of its form, treating social interaction as a hallmark of liberty. He argued that African notions of spirituality and musicality mixed with European notions of Christianity and African American experiences of bondage and oppression and resulted in “the sole American music . . . the singular spiritual heritage of the nation.” Du Bois saw the Sorrow Songs as American music because they evolved from black and white social interaction, give and take, respect and sometimes admiration.43 Thus, this art form, the Sorrow Songs, and the creativity they reflect, served as a symbol of what was possible where the liberty of civic humanism prevailed.
It turns out that “Of the Sorrow Songs” is more than a discussion of spirituals, religion, African survivals, and the African American contribution to American culture—the usual interpretations of the chapter. Equally important, it is more than a conclusion to a detailed discussion about liberty, although it is clearly that as well. It is as much a conclusion to the book as “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” is the book’s real introduction. At the beginning of the chapter on the spirituals, Du Bois described the songs as “the greatest gift of the Negro people.” But at the end of the chapter, he noted that there were three gifts: “the gift of sweat and brawn”; “a gift of story and song”; and “a gift of the Spirit.” He explored aspects of all three gifts in the preceding chapters. The “gift of sweat and brawn” was obviously the gift of work. The “gift of story and song” was the gift of culture. And in the chapter on the songs and in all the others, the “gift of the Spirit” was the example of never-ending striving not just for (individual) freedom but for (collective) liberty.
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Many who have studied The Souls of Black Folk point out the centrality of Du Bois’ general commentary on the nature of American culture. Eric Sundquist stated it most clearly when he wrote, “Despite the book’s exceptional interpretive demands, . . . nothing can cloud Du Bois’s cogent arguments that white American culture simply cannot be imagined apart from Black American culture.”44 But beyond this, Du Bois composed a complex, coherent, and consistent discussion about work, culture, and liberty. He demonstrated that the spiritual world in which those “ten thousand thousand [black] Americans live and strive” was full of ambition and potential. The material world in which they resided, however, was both corrupt and destructive. Most scholars have pointed to the color line as a symbol of that depravity, and the death of the fictional John Jones vividly illustrated its potential to waste human life. But some people (like Du Bois) could, temporarily at least, escape the boundary and “dwell above the veil.” As he so eloquently wrote in one of the most powerful passages of the book, ironically describing his ride in a Jim Crow railroad car:
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. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.45
Some individuals, like Crummell, could subvert and/or overcome the debilitating consequences that could result from being both an American and a Negro. Indeed, most people, including those mired in the debt and poverty of “the Black Belt,” regularly sought to integrate their own needs and values and those that existed beyond the veil. And as Du Bois concluded, “This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.”
The real problem was that having decided to be a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture,” most black people had little opportunity to realize their ambition. Contributing effectively to “the kingdom of culture,” an objective of the striving of the souls of black folk, required the opportunity to realize their aspirations and potential for work, culture, and liberty regardless of the side of the color line on which they sought to fulfill their ambition. The destruction of John Jones ultimately lay in the fact that he could not fully “live and strive” on either side.46
The lack of opportunity might destroy the souls of black folk; it could easily result in hate, doubt, and despair, in Du Bois’ own words characterizing the odyssey of the tremendously able Crummell. But just as surely as the culture that worked to stunt black striving had destroyed the Black Belt, John Jones, and probably Josie, it also destroyed the White Belt, the Cotton Kingdom, and John Henderson. Du Bois understood that “no secure civilization can be built” where so significant a segment of the population lacked the opportunity to fulfill its striving for work, culture, and liberty. He used The Souls of Black Folk to reconstruct that striving, explore its meaning, and provide a warning should it fail.