The Souls of Black Folk

Du Bois weaves words together to create a pictorial masterpiece of literature. The sentences are so gorgeous that you want to read them out loud just to experience the pleasure of the sound and the speaking of them. I was absolutely blind-sided by their beauty because, in our internet age, that talent is often overlooked in favor of sharp, short sentences.

His words are often prophetic ("I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future"*), heartrending (his chapters on the death of show more his son and the racism he observed and lived with), and thought-provoking (his chapters on education... have we forgotten its purpose?).

I highly recommend this book. It also gives you a good starting point into historical issues that may or may not be overlooked in our simplified history classes.

Also, fun fact, he is featured several times in [b:Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster|33898873|Invisible The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster|Stephen L. Carter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532468031l/33898873._SX50_.jpg|54863805] which also is a book worth your time.

*Pg. 94 show less

Sometimes a book just blows my mind. This is one of them!

To think that this book, with the most cogent explanation of the race situation in the US, was written over one hundred years ago is just astounding. That a black man was so well educated in the US at the start of the twentieth century was a surprise. That any person, surrounded by such prejudice, could produce such an honest book leaves me almost speechless.

Du Bois is honest about the failings of his fellows, both black and white. He manages to write without the venom that I know that would fill my prose, were I to live under such injustice.

And yet, and yet... I have still to pronounce its greatest achievement. When one reads a book and thinks, "I should have known that": it show more indicates that the facts are self evidently true.

How can this book be so little known? Were it a set book - not just in America, but in England and probably every other country too, then racism would become a thing of the past in no time. show less

This collection of fourteen essays is written in an ornate style that shouldn’t obscure their enduring relevance, one hundred twenty years after the book appeared. Not that everything has remained the same since then—even Du Bois developed and changed his thinking over time. Perhaps conditions are not precisely as rendered in the two essays based on his sociological fieldwork in Dougherty County, in southwest Georgia. Nevertheless, they brought to mind and helped me understand what my child’s eyes took in uncomprehendingly sixty-five, seventy years ago as we drove the pre-Interstate Georgia roads.
Perhaps the felt relevance indicates that material change can outpace change in attitude and perception.
One of my favorite essays dealt show more with the history of the Black church. Another, on the death at eighteen months of his firstborn, was a poignant, bitter expression of the divided soul of the Black man.
Reading this book, I was struck again by the thought that accompanied me throughout my visit to the Smithsonian African American History and Culture Museum. No matter which side of what Du Bois calls “the Veil” we find ourselves on, this is our story. This is a book about and for all of us. show less

The author's attempt, through various narratives, to assist white America in 1903 to perhaps come to a better understanding of the situation and condition of America's black population.

DuBois is a masterful author. In this book he does everything from defending the Freedmen's Bureau to describing the plight of black people in a particular county in Georgia. He speaks of his own experiences as a college student, as a teacher, and of the loss of his own child to illness. He preserves the tunes of many a song and ends his book with a chapter on such songs.

Above all things DuBois proves prophetic, declaring that the 20th century would be overshadowed by the "Negro problem" and perceiving that Reconstruction would be looked upon poorly for show more many generations and could only be seen in a more positive light once black America was re-enfranchised. He provides an important perspective, writing just as a new and quite powerful wave of resentment overcame the South in the form of the Jim Crow laws and even greater restrictions than before, standing a generation removed from slavery and yet with the stories of slaves still ringing in their ears, looking forward to struggle which would take the better part of the century...and after more than a century has still not come to a complete end.

Over 100 years later the book remains compelling and a valuable read for any who would still wish to explore the "souls of black folk." show less

This book shows how far backward we have moved as a society in the past 120 years. In addition to stunningly beautiful prose, Du Bois analyzed the history of black (and white) people (in America overall, but particularly in the South), the problems of slavery and the then-current reconstruction and post-reconstruction south, and paths to equality for everyone. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone could write something so honest today without being attacked by at least half of society, and many of the issues identified are still problems today.

It was useful that Du Bois had the perspective of a highly educated northerner (first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard, back when a PhD from Harvard meant something...) visiting the South show more (Atlanta, specifically). When this book was written, the "great migration" to the North had still not happened, so black issues were largely separate North and South. The most interesting part for me was how a large group, mostly oppressed/uneducated/powerless at the time, had to come to terms with a small subset becoming highly educated -- and whether that subset would then work for their own interests or try to uplift everyone else. show less

Du Bois densely eloquent, compelling, and evocative essays deliver an education into the history of the most terrifying and hideous centuries
in the United States of America. It will inspire action to change our professed Democracy! Even more after the horror of January 6, 2021.

The collection would have rated 5 stars if Du Bois had not revealed his own racial prejudice by repeatedly singling out "Russian Jews"
and their behavior from the rest of "Whites."

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/meeting-w-e-b-du-bois/

This centenary edition has an excellent introduction by Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor at Columbia University, who identifies features of the fourteen essays that account for their status as ‘a founding text of African-American studies’:

its insistence on an interdisciplinary understanding of black life, on historically grounded and philosophically sound analysis, on the scholar’s role as advocate and activist, and on close study of the cultural products of the objects of examination

I would add that the book is beautifully written: all the marshalling of fact, the polemic, the analysis would stand strongly by themselves, but the music of the writing carries show more them home. And it’s intensely personal.
In a book that often says we to mean the society as a whole, that consistently speaks to our common humanity, that last word is worth a thousand pictures.

The word racism didn’t exist until the 1930s. Du Bois talks about ‘the Veil’, sometimes ‘the Veil of race’. Far from being a literary affectation as a contemporary review included in this edition implies, the image communicates powerfully. Du Bois describes himself as living within the Veil; he holds his baby son in his arms and see the shadow of the Veil fall across him; he hopes that for the ‘thousand thousand dark children’ tempted to hate, ‘someone will some day lift the Veil, – will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away’; he takes joy from Shakespeare, Balzac, Aristotle, because when he is with them, he dwells above the Veil.

There’s an awful lot in this book that’s quotable, an awful lot that could have been written this morning, though it probably would have been couched differently – less reference to classical myth, for instance). The need to communicate through the world’s many Veils is at least as pressing today as in 1903.

The book is not just about racism or Black folk as victims. It’s about people with souls. He is very clear that Black folk have made a vast contribution to the prosperity and spiritual growth of the US. show less