The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois Study Notes

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

The Forethought

• The book aims to reveal the meaning of being black at the dawn of the 20th century.

• The central problem of the 20th century is the color line.

• Du Bois seeks understanding and forgiveness for mistakes in his work.

• The book sketches the spiritual world of ten thousand thousand Americans, focusing on:

  • The meaning and aftermath of Emancipation.

  • The rise of personal leadership.

  • The worlds within and without the Veil.

  • The training of men for life.

  • The struggles of the black peasantry.

  • The relations between masters and men.

  • The deeper recesses of black religion, sorrow, and struggle.

• Some of these ideas appeared previously in publications like Atlantic Monthly.

• Each chapter begins with a bar of Sorrow Songs.

• Du Bois identifies himself as "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil."

CHAPTER I Of Our Spiritual Strivings

• There is an unasked question between Du Bois and the world about the experience of being a problem.

• Being a problem is a strange experience that dawns on a person in boyhood.

• Du Bois recounts an incident in a New England school where a girl refused his visiting card, revealing his difference.

• He initially responded with contempt, focusing on academic and athletic achievements.

• As he grew older, he yearned for opportunities and decided to wrest them from others through various professions.

• Other black boys reacted differently, with sycophancy, hatred, or despair.

• Du Bois describes the Negro as a "seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight."

• This leads to a double-consciousness, seeing oneself through the eyes of others and measuring one's soul by their contempt.

• This double-consciousness results in two souls, two thoughts, and two unreconciled strivings within one body.

• The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, seeking self-conscious manhood.

• The goal is to be both Negro and American without facing discrimination.

• This involves contributing to culture, escaping isolation, and using one's best powers.

• The powers of black men have been wasted or forgotten throughout history.

• The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan, minister, doctor, or savant leads to ineffectiveness due to divided loyalties.

• This waste of double aims has caused people to seek false gods and means of salvation.

• During slavery, Freedom was worshipped as the key to a promised land.

• Emancipation came suddenly but the "swarthy spectre" of the Negro problem remains.

• The freedman has not found his promised land, leading to deep disappointment.

• The first decade after emancipation was a vain search for freedom, hindered by violence and disorganization.

• The Fifteenth Amendment led to the ideal of political power, but the revolution of 1876 left them weary.

• Gradually, the ideal of "book-learning" emerged as a new path to Canaan.

• The advance was slow and difficult, but it fostered self-consciousness, self-realization, and self-respect.

• He began to analyze the burden of social degradation and felt the weight of poverty and ignorance.

• The red stain of bastardy from the systematic defilement of Negro women posed a hereditary challenge.

• Prejudice was explained as a defense against barbarism, but the Negro cried Amen! only to the extent that it was founded on righteousness and progress.

• He reacted with despair to the personal disrespect, mockery, ridicule, and systematic humiliation.

• The time of Sturm und Drang brought inner conflict and doubt.

• Ideals of physical freedom, political power, and training of brains and hands have waned.

• To be true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one.

• The training of schools, the power of the ballot, and freedom are all needed together.

• This strives toward the ideal of human brotherhood through the unifying ideal of Race.

• The goal is to foster the traits and talents of the Negro in conformity with American ideals.

• Black men offer the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence, true American music, and simple faith.

• The Negro Problem is a concrete test of the principles of the Republic.

• The spiritual striving of freedmen is a travail of souls bearing a burden beyond their strength.

CHAPTER II Of the Dawn of Freedom

• The problem of the twentieth century is the color-line in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the sea.

• This problem caused the Civil War, centered on the question of Negro slavery.

• The question of what to do with Negroes arose as Northern armies entered Southern soil.

• Military commands could not answer the query, and the Emancipation Proclamation broadened the difficulties.

• The War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.

• This essay studies the period of history from 1861 to 1872, relating to the American Negro.

• It is an account of the Freedmen's Bureau, an attempt to grapple with race and social condition problems.

• Congress initially denied the war's connection to slaves, but fugitive slaves appeared within army lines.

• Two methods of treating these newcomers emerged: Butler declared them contraband of war, while Fremont declared them free.

• Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was countermanded.

• Secretary Cameron noted that slaves were a military resource and should not be turned over to the enemy.

• Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives which welcomed “contrabands” as military laborers.

• The stream of runaways swelled to a flood, raising concerns about food and shelter.

• A Pierce of Boston suggested a way forward and became the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau.

• The United States government assumed charge of the emancipated Negro as a ward of the nation.

• This was a tremendous undertaking, governing millions of men emasculated by slavery.

• Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard was assigned as Commissioner of the new Bureau.

• He was an honest man with limited business aptitude but had firsthand knowledge of the work.

• The organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau was one of the great landmarks of political and social progress.

• To understand the work of the Bureau, one must remember the drift of things in the later sixties.

• Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads.

• The Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, and the Fourteenth pending.

• Guerrilla raiding was spending its forces against the Negroes.

• The social uplifting of four million slaves was a herculean task in such conditions.

• The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing that men had refused to argue against.

• The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves

• The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay in the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men.

• Two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,

• In 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials were scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling many millions of men.

• The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads:

  • The relief of physical suffering,

  • The overseeing of the beginnings of free labor,

  • The buying and selling of land,

  • The establishment of schools,

  • The paying of bounties,

  • The administration of justice, and

  • The financiering of all these activities.

• Up to June 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had been in operation.

• In fifty months, twenty-one million free rations were distributed at a cost of over 4,000,000 dollars.

• Next came the difficult question of labor.

• First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working.

• Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor.

• So labor contracts were written,

• The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler

• Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South.

• On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and the exercise of its judicial functions.

• Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom

• Someone had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of control there would have been far more than there was.

• The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men.

• The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation.

• To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?

• It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities.

• The political ambition of many of its agents and protégés led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred.

• So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.

• That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

• Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed.

• The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

Dubois Web Biography:

https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/web-dubois