W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (review)

As he strolled along downtown Atlanta’s Mitchell Street in 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois learned that Sam Wilkes’s body had been barbequed and his knuckles now were on display in a grocer’s window up the street. For author Edward Blum, Wilkes’s lynching was the catalyst for the “holy war” (39) W. E. B. Du Bois would wage against oppression. The phrase is deliberate: Blum’s Du Bois is a religious warrior whose works comprise a spiritual rage against America’s sins of violence, greed, and hypocrisy. “When religion is accounted for in his life,” Blum maintains, “Du Bois appears in the mold of an Old Testament Isaiah declaring the vengeance of God against a sinful, neglectful, and hateful world of racial and economic disabilities. This spiritual rage touched every element of his career and was one of the defining features of his long and storied life” (12). Scholars of rhetoric, politics, civil rights, and literary and cultural studies should give careful attention to Blum’s study; he has provided an engaging history of Du Bois’s work, one that, as it ranges among his sociological and historical treatises, to The Souls of Black Folk, to his autobiographies, fiction, and poetry, shows how Du Bois’s life was “one full of religious wonder, questioning, and wrestling” (18).

The analysis begins with Du Bois’s autobiographies. In these “‘mythologies of self,’” we see how Du Bois “drew on a variety of religious allusions and symbolic structures to present [himself] as a hero-priest and a prophet-teacher” (25). For Blum, notions of identity and self are central to these narratives, and his analysis deftly uncovers the ways Du Bois and other black authors marshaled these ideas to resist white supremacist counter-narratives. “By judging the faith of whites to be inauthentic and by finding a new strength in their own faith,” notes Blum, Du Bois and his fellow writers “vied for rhetorical control over the religious state of the nation and endeavored to tear apart the association of whiteness and godliness” (55). Du Bois spent a lifetime creating a “mythological life” that “touched on cosmic truths and values” and thus enabled him to sustain a campaign of “rage against white supremacy [that] was a spiritual rage,” a “critique of black society that was a spiritual critique” (59). The chapter challenges what we thought we knew about Du Bois and especially the ways he constructed the depths of his self.

That spirit of challenge also informs chapter 2, “Race as Cosmic Sight in The Souls of Black Folk.” Perhaps Du Bois’s most profound work, Souls remains the quintessential statement on African American identity. For Blum, Du Bois’s book is understood best as a sacred text, and sustained attention is given to the “Forethought” of Souls, suggesting it serves as the key with which the rest of the book might be opened (64). That key is Biblical: the image of the veil, found in two different places in Exodus, signaled an effort on the part of the Hebrews to separate the sacred from the mundane, good from evil. By using the “veil” as a metaphor for raising up the sacredness of black culture, Du Bois demonstrated “that biblical conceptions deeply influenced his theoretical view of race in the United States and the world” (80). Blum’s summary judgment about Souls connects that theoretical view to deeper religious emphases that permeate the book. “Read in terms of nineteenth-century discourse on race and religion, Souls was a literary act not only of theological and cultural defiance but also of religious creation” (96), one that revealed the breadth of Du Bois’s cosmic vision on questions of racial identity and radical reform. That vision also assumed trenchant form in Du Bois’s works of sociology, history, and literature.

Expecting to see Du Bois’s religious imagination across his works, Blum finds examples of that imagination in lectures Du Bois presented at...