W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk

Introduction

1 introduction “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, 2 Introduction 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-yetestablished 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...