The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Larsen describes him as "peppery," and I like that. He's civil, but he's quietly laying haymakers. It's an important book. To a depressing extent, when we talk about racial injustice these days, we're still repeating DuBois.

It is nonfiction - essays on the challenges Blacks face in the wake of the Civil War - so be aware, it's not like it's going to have a plot. I'm reading it one chapter at a time between other things; going straight through was making me miss some stuff.

The prologue, with the iconic question, "How does it feel to be a Problem?" and the confession that, looking at white folks, Du Bois sometimes wanted to just "beat their stringy heads," is worth the price of admission. ( )

One of the toughest, most interesting non-fiction reads I've experienced.

The Souls of Black Folk was required reading for me this year - although the class only dealt with five or so chapters, I was so intrigued by what I was reading that I had to finish the entire book.

Each essay provided plenty of food for thought - but most interesting to me was the essay on the education of former slaves - what was appropriate and what was not. This is a part of history that really hasn't been part of my education, and not only did I find it enlightening, historically speaking, I also found it to be relevant today - for all types.

With our focus on getting straight into college after high school (and my experience with some siblings that just doesn't work for), I think what Du Bois has to say is incredibly insightful. Not every person is cut out for a life of academia after high school, and specialized training is there for a reason. As I attend school, and each semester say goodbye to more and more friends who just, for whatever reason, are not coming back, I find myself thinking more about the ideas that Du Bois so eloquently writes down.

I recommend this reading. I think everyone should read it - and I challenge you to do so. ( )

I expected this book to be academic essays into the plight of southern Black citizens. Instead, I found flowing prose and descriptive narratives to recount his travels and share the struggles of "Black people." I especially found the story of his son touching. It is no wonder this has become a classic. ( )

I'm not sure there is a way to praise this book higher than I would like to. Even its flaws only make it more of its time, more piercingly relevant, more obviously coming out of its context.I came in expecting a successor to Douglass, someone with one foot in prophetic mode and one foot in smackdown mode, and it's true that Du Bois does both of those things fantastically well. But what really gets to me is just how wide-ranging his skillset turns out to be, from long-form reportage to history and historiography, not to mention all this amateur art criticism around slave spirituals. Like a lot of great American writers of the period, he's insanely well-rounded: He can start with a hyper-detailed description of Atlanta, take you into what became the Historically Black Colleges, show you around dirt-poor sharecroppers and taxonomize them by relative levels of poverty and autonomy, tell funny and sad stories about the characters he's met in his travels, then turn around and use one of them to summarize Booker T. Washington and slice his whole program into little ribbons without losing his cool or his politeness. Two minutes later, you're getting a definition of "the veil" or "double consciousness," which people still have to debate the accuracy of as explanatory tools -- then suddenly some Old Testament-level high rhetoric and moral fury drops on you in great big paragraphs of furious dignity.You can tell he's staking out what he wants to call a moderate position here, acknowledging some things that we in the 21st century would call reactionary (the whole bit about the purported stunted moral character of ex-slaves, the Talented Tenth bit about "uplifting the race", and some very wide generalizing). But I don't know of very many people who ever worked in this short-essay form who ever did this better, or who appear to have had such a powerful effect on a debate by straight-up winning the argument. ( )

Being a collection of essays, the book lacks a certain flow and is a bit redundant in places. Those criticisms aside, DuBois was a great wordsmith.

While some of his allusions and references are dated (footnotes and endnotes offer simple explanations for the modern reader), this book can speak to the 21st century reader. The state of race relations may have improved over the last hundred years, but we are far from where we should be in that regard.

DuBois, wisely, called for education to be broad based, rather than merely technical. This is as true today, as it was in 1903. A broad based education that leads to improved critical thinking and problem solving is sorely lacking the current educational system in the United States (for all).

I was surprised that his dispute with Booker T. Washington was more civil than I thought. He showed great respect for Washington as a man who sought to advance the lot of African Americans. Modern social critics and politicians (left, right and center) could learn a valuable lesson on civil discourse from DuBois's words regarding Washington.

The "slice of life" chapters open the window on the real condition of African Americans in the South at the turn of 20th century. One can see why he later became so disillusioned with the trajectory of the color line in American life. ( )