Up from “Twoness”: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of W.E.B. Dubois’s Concept of Double Consciousness

UP FROM "TWONESS":FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND THE MEANING OF W.E.B. DUBOIS'S CONCEPT OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS David JV:Blight Even the educated colored: the long school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Toni ~forrison, Bc!O\·ed,1987 A nation's identity is derived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counterpointed certain opposite potentialities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950 Frederick Douglass and W.E. B. DuBois may never have actually met; so far as can be determined, they never corresponded. In January, 1893, in what he described as "the first and last time I saw Douglass," the youthful DuBois was in the audience when the elder statesman delivered a lecture on Haiti at the Chicago World's Fair. Douglass died in 1895, the year DuBois received his doctorate from Harvard and one year after the young scholar's return from studying at the University of Berlin. Douglass did not live long enough to read the great early writings of DuBois. But if he had encountered The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the concept of "lwoness" might have struck the former slave with deep personal meaning. DuBois's famous passage about "double consciousness," the peculiar African-American dilemma of being "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body ... " might have been recognized by Douglass as an astute description of his own inner life, since he was the nineteenth century's most conspicuous example of a black leader's striving to overcome the effects of double, or even multiple, consciousness. Douglass had lived this "double-aimed struggle" over national and cultural identity; he was an eloquent witness to the ravages of poverty and ignorance caused by slavery 302 David W. Blight and racism; he understood the personal price in his own life, in his own family and among his friends of what DuBois termed the "waste of double aims." Although DuBois never knew Douglass, he would later acknowledge the abolitionist as the "first national Negro leader." 1 There is no overt evidence that DuBois had Douglass specifically in mind as a model while crafting the psychological insights in the book. As Wilson Moses has written, DuBois was not necessarily a "medium" through which Douglass's egalitarian-assimilationist legacy directly survived. Over an unusually long and turbulent life, DuBois's thought was far too complex for easy categorization. DuBois's principal models were the members of the American Negro Academy of the 1890s (the real "Talented Tenth"), especially Alexander Crummell. Moreover, in many ways, Du Bois was simply his own model. However, more than scholars on this subject have observed, similarities abound between the thought of DuBois and Douglass, especially in the common circumstances of double consciousness. As an elitist, formally educated Germanophile, whose race consciousness had only emerged on the eve of Douglass's death, DuBois would naturally have turned elsewhere than to the former slave for his most obvious models. Moreover, in 1903 DuBois was preoccupied with refuting the social and educational philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the preeminent black leader and the person at whom much of Souls is directed. Souls is autobiographical, analytical and retrospective. But on a deeper level, the despairing tone of much of the book only dimly masks its transcendent appeal to overcome the agonies of the present with a faith, a cultural endurance, and interpretive devices that DuBois inherited from the past perhaps as much as he created them. In the face of mere "faltering ... inches of progress" since emancipation, DuBois wrote, the freed people had achieved a dawning "selfconsciousness " and "self-respect." No black thinker had done more to forge that consciousness or to record his own struggle than Frederick Douglass. 2 Douglass and DuBois lived and worked in different historical contexts, but they faced common dilemmas in what...