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Video explaining the historical context of the Reconstruction Era

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Video explaining the historical context of the Reconstruction Era

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This video is helpful because it explains key historical events, figures and texts that influenced the Reconstruction Era, particularly for African-Americans

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Reconstruction: Crash Course Black American History #19

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I believe that this quote is useful due to the fact that the quote shows W.E.B Du Bois's preferred social system. It indicates his distaste for the capitalist system.

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A biography of Du Bois, talking about his early life and upbringing, his accomplishments such as the book titled "The Souls of Black Folk" , as well as his staggering contribution to the NAACP.

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an influential African American rights activist during the early 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and wrote ‘The Souls of Black Folk.’

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This article is helpful because it thouroughly documents the life of W.E.B Du Bois and his long and iconoclastic career.

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W.E.B. Du Bois, (born February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.-died August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The Souls of Black Folk, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of Blacks. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Blacks in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta University in Georgia, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), the first case study of a Black community in the United States.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential Black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged Blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of whites. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington's strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the Black community into two wings-the "conservative" supporters of Washington and his "radical" critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington's opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association's director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class Blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the Black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of Black Americans:

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder....He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois's Black nationalism took several forms-the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism, the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism. As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of Black literature and art and urged his readers to see "Beauty in Black." Third, Du Bois's Black nationalism is seen in his belief that Blacks should develop a separate "group economy" of producers' and consumers' cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and Black poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the Black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois's interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of Black capitalism and Black support of Black business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University's "Review of Race and Culture." In 1945 he published the "Preparatory Volume" of a projected Encyclopedia Africana, for which he had been appointed editor in chief and toward which he had been working for decades. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of Reconstruction (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of Blacks in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this brilliant book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the Black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944-48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he applied to, and was accepted as a member of, the Communist Party. That same year he left the United States for Ghana, where he began work on the Encyclopedia Africana in earnest, though it would never be completed, and where he later became a citizen.

Du Bois also wrote several novels, including the trilogy The Black Flame (1957-61). The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in the United States in 1968.
Elliott Rudwick The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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W.E.B. Du Bois | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist. He was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.

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As mentioned in this video, for the 151 birthday of Du Bois this video was made. This brief video includes inforation about him such as evedidence they are refering to. In a part of the video there are pages of a book showen that corelate with the infromation explained.

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This quote represents the way an individual should be thinking about life generally. As there will come a time where one will fail and a time where they will do greatly. At the end of the day, life is only filled with possibilities.

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I chose this picture becuse this is the picture of Du Bois that most people see when searching him up.

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Speech serves as a greater, more direct perspective into the beliefs of Dr. Du Bois.

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W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro (Full)

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W.E.B Du Bois was an African American activist for black people and a sociologists. He influenced the society that anything can change in the society if the rights things used to fight for it are promoted. Du Bois was much passionate about his writing to help show other people that they can also use their voice to achieve something.

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Who Was: W.E.B. Du Bois | Encyclopaedia Britannica

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'The Comet' is an interesting short story by Du Bois because it delves into the idea that people believe that they themselves are more important than they actually are.

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Image of an old news paper highlighting Dr. W.E.B. DuBois death in Acra, Ghana

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Souls of Black Folk; an iconic Du Bois Work

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Souls of Black Folk; an iconic Du Bois Work

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This extensive and desciptive article illustrates the power of the iconic book The Souls of Black Folk and discusses its political implications in African-American history.

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The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.

The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois used the term " double consciousness", perhaps taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The Transcendentalist" and "Fate"), applying it to the idea that black people must have two fields of vision at all times. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how the world views them.

Each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk begins with a pair of epigraphs: text from a poem, usually by a European poet, and the musical score of a spiritual, which Du Bois describes in his foreword ("The Forethought") as "some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past". Columbia University English and comparative literature professor Brent Hayes Edwards writes:

It is crucial to recognize that Du Bois ... chooses not to include the lyrics to the spirituals, which often serve to underline the arguments of the chapters: Booker T. Washington's idealism is echoed in the otherworldly salvation hoped for in "A Great Camp-Meeting in the Promised Land", for example; likewise the determined call for education in "Of the Training of Black Men" is matched by the strident words of "March On".

Edwards adds that Du Bois may have withheld the lyrics to mark a barrier for the reader, to suggest that black culture-life "within the veil"-remains inaccessible to white people.

In "The Forethought", Du Bois states: "Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,-the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls." He concludes with the words: "...need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?"

Chapter I, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings", lays out an overview of Du Bois's thesis. He says that the blacks of the South need the right to vote, the right to a good education, and to be treated with equality and justice. Here, he also coined " double-consciousness", defined as a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

The first chapter also introduces Du Bois's famous metaphor of the veil. According to Du Bois, this veil is worn by all African-Americans because their view of the world and its potential economic, political, and social opportunities are so vastly different from those of white people. The veil is a visual manifestation of the color line, a problem Du Bois worked his whole life to remedy. Du Bois sublimates the function of the veil when he refers to it as a gift of second sight for African Americans, thus simultaneously characterizing the veil as both a blessing and a curse.

He gives credit to the creation of Fisk University, Clark Atlanta University, Howard University, and Hampton University and acknowledges the "apostles of human culture" Edmund Asa Ware, Samuel C. Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. He worried that the demise of the Freedman's Savings Bank, which resulted in huge losses for many freedmen of any savings, resulted in freedmen losing "all the faith in savings".

Chapters III and VI deal with education and progress. Here Du Bois argues against Booker T. Washington's idea of focusing solely on industrial education for black men. He advocates the addition of a classical education to establish leaders and educators in the black community.

Note: By the time Du Bois published his book, most of the former Confederate states had completed disenfranchisement of blacks, led by Mississippi in 1890, by constitutional amendments and other laws raising barriers to voter registration, primarily through poll taxes, residency and recordkeeping requirements, subjective literacy tests and other devices. Virginia passed similar laws in 1908. By excluding blacks from political life, southern legislatures were able to pass Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory methods.

In the fourth chapter, "Of the Meaning of Progress", Du Bois explores his experiences first, when he was teaching in Tennessee. Secondly he returned after 10 years and found the town where he had worked had suffered many unpleasant changes. He says: "My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly."

The fifth chapter is a meditation on the necessity of widespread higher education in the South.

Du Bois compares Atlanta, the City of a Hundred Hills, to Atalanta, and warns against the "greed of gold," or "interpreting the world in dollars." The "Black World beyond the Veil", should not succumb "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness," to the ideal of wealth attainment in public schools.

Du Bois calls Albany, Georgia, in Dougherty County, the "heart of the Black Belt." He says: "Here are the remnants of the vast plantations."

Economically, the Negro has become a slave of debt, says Du Bois. He describes the economic classes: the "submerged tenth" of croppers, 40 percent are metayers or "tenant on shares" with a chattel mortgage, 39 percent are semi-metayers and wage-laborers, while 5 percent are money-renters, and 6 percent freeholders. Finally, du Bois states that only 6 percent "have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship", leading to a "migration to town", the "buying of small homesteads near town".: 123, 128, 132

In Chapter X, Du Bois describes the rise of the black church and examines the history and contemporary state of religion and spiritualism among African Americans.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to narratives of individuals. In Chapter XI, "Of the Passing of the First-Born", Du Bois recounts the birth of his first child, a son, and his untimely death as an infant. His son, Burghardt, contracted diphtheria and white doctors in Atlanta refused to treat black patients.

In this chapter, Du Bois recounts a short biography of Alexander Crummell, an early black priest in the Episcopal Church.

The penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, "Of the Coming of John", "reads like a short story, [but] Du Bois clearly considered it an essay." (See footnote to this essay in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). The essay/story describes two young men, both named John, one Black (John Jones) and the other white (John Henderson, the son of the wealthy and powerful Judge Henderson). Both Johns grow up in Altamaha, Georgia, where they were playmates in their youth. Both leave to go off to college, and both the white and Black communities in Altamaha anticipate their returns, saying: "When John comes." When John Jones returns to his hometown, transformed by his time away, now a serious man with a deep understanding of the world, including the injustice of racism and of Jim Crow, he finds himself at odds with both Black and white. He speaks at his church, but what he says falls flat: "[l]ittle had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue" (Du Bois 170). He convinces Judge Henderson to let him become a teacher at the Black school, and is warned to keep his place and to not stir up trouble. The Judge makes his opinions clear: "in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men....But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every N-- in the land." John Jones says he accepts the situation and is allowed to teach. It's hard work, but he makes some headway. Some time passes. One day, word gets back to the Judge that John Jones is "livenin' things up at the darky school." While Judge Henderson storms off to shut down the school, his son, John Henderson, grows bored and leaves his home and finds John Jones's sister. She is young and beautiful, and John Henderson is bored. He demands a kiss; she runs. He pursues her. John Jones, walking home from the school, which Judge Henderson has just closed, comes upon John Henderson accosting his sister. John Jones picks up a branch and defends his sister, killing John Henderson. In the final paragraphs, a lynch mob on horseback approaches with the Judge in front, for whom John Jones is filled with pity. Knowing what is ahead, John Jones "softly hum[s] the 'Song of the Bride'" in German. (Du Bois 176).

Chapter XIV, " The Sorrow songs", is about Negro music. He refers to the short musical passages at the beginning of each of the other chapters. Du Bois mentions that the music was so powerful and meaningful that, regardless of the people's appearance and teaching, "their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power." Du Bois concludes the chapter by bringing up inequality, race and discrimination. He says, "Your country? How came it yours?..we were here".

Du Bois heralds the "melody of the slave songs," or the Negro spirituals, as the "articulate message of the slave to the world." They are the music, he contends, not of the joyous black slave, as a good many whites had misread them, but "of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways." For Du Bois, the sorrow songs represented a black folk culture-with its origins in slavery-unadulterated by the civilizing impulses of a northern black church, increasingly obsessed with respectability and with Western aesthetic criteria. Rather than vestiges of a backward time that should be purged from black repertoires and isolated from what Alain Locke called the "modernization of the negro" (coincident, for Locke, with urbanization), negro spirituals are-for Du Bois-where the souls of black folk past and present are found.

Du Bois passionately advocated for the preservation of the spiritual, along with Antonín Dvořák and contemporary black aestheticians, including Harry Burleigh, Robert Nathaniel Dett, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston. It is in the retrieval of black cultural folkways-particularly "The Sorrow Songs"-that one of the major complications of Du Bois's project and, later, the Harlem Renaissance (where Hurston and Locke debut their own retrievals) surfaces. For Du Bois's contention that the sorrow songs contain a notative excess, and untranscribable element Yolanda Pierce identifies as the "soul" of the sorrow songs. The mappings of sound and signs that make up the languages of white Western culture would prove insufficient to many black literary critics of the 1920s and beyond, and the debates over the abilities to retrieve and preserve black folkways find their roots in Du Bois's treatment of the sorrow songs and in his call for their rescue.

In Living Black History, Du Bois's biographer Manning Marable observes:

Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. "Souls" justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class. By describing a global color-line, Du Bois anticipated pan-Africanism and colonial revolutions in the Third World. Moreover, this stunning critique of how 'race' is lived through the normal aspects of daily life is central to what would become known as ' whiteness studies' a century later.

At the time of its publication, the Nashville Banner warned of The Souls of Black Folk, "This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only incite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind." The New York Times said, "A review of [the work of the Freedmen's Bureau] from the negro point of view, even the Northern negro's point of view, must have its value to any unprejudiced student-still more, perhaps, for the prejudiced who is yet willing to be a student."

In his introduction to the 1961 edition, writer Saunders Redding observed, "The boycott of the buses in Montgomery had many roots . . . but none more important than this little book of essays published more than half a century ago."

Literary reception

As Yale professor Hazel Carby points out, for black writers before the abolition of slavery in 1865, it was impossible "even to imagine the option of returning to the South once black humanity and freedom had been gained in the North", and it was rarely found in later literature as well. While the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs move towards the North and freedom, Du Bois reverses "the direction of the archetypal journey of these original narratives" and focuses on the Black Belt of the South. Although the text "consistently shifts between a predominantly white and a predominantly black world", in line with Du Bois's concept of double consciousness, "its overall narrative impulse gradually moves the focus from a white terrain to an autonomous black one."

Carby traces the ways in which Du Bois gendered his narrative of black folk, but also how Du Bois's conceptual framework is gendered as well. According to Carby, it seems that Du Bois in this book is most concerned with how race and nation intersect, and how such an intersection is based on particular masculine notions of progress. According to Carby, Du Bois "exposes and exploits the tension that exists between the internal egalitarianism of the nation and the relations of domination and subordination embodied in a racially encoded social hierarchy." So Du Bois makes a conceptual argument that racialization is actually compatible with the nation in so far as it creates unified races. However, this unified race is only possible through the gendered narrative that he constructs throughout Souls, which renders black male intellectuals (himself) as the (only possible) leader(s) of the unified race. Carby explains that "in order to retain his credentials for leadership, Du Bois had to situate himself as both an exceptional and a representative individual.... The terms and conditions of his exceptionalism, Du Bois argues, have their source in his formation as a gendered intellectual." According to Carby, Du Bois was concerned with "the reproduction of Race Men". In other words, "the figure of the intellectual and race leader is born of and engendered by other males."

Such a reading of Du Bois calls attention to "queer meanings" that, according to Charles Nero, are inherent in Souls. Nero, who uses Anne Herrmann's definition of queer, conceptualizes queerness as the "recognition on the part of others that one is not like others, a subject out of order, not in sequence, not working." Foundational to Nero's argument is the understanding that men have the authority to exchange women among one another in order to form a "homosocial contract". Nero analyzes Du Bois's discussion on the Teutonic and Submissive Man to conclude that such a contract would lead to a "round and full development" to produce a "great civilization". However, Nero is concerned with violence and the "rigid policing of sexual identity categories at the turn of the century", which ultimately made such a homosocial, biracial contract impossible.

In Charles I. Nero's "Queering the Souls of Black Folk", Nero marks "Of the Coming of John" as a central chapter that demonstrates his queer reading of Souls. Nero argues that John Jones's absence of masculinity is a sign of his queerness and that the killing of his "double" represents Du Bois's disillusionment with the idea that a biracial and homosocial society can exist. Nero contends that Du Bois's illustration of the gulf between the two Johns is complicated by the impossibility of biracial male union, which suggests that John's acculturation in the metropole (Johnstown in Du Bois's narrative)-alongside lessons in Victorian comportment and a "queer" intellectualism-is also an ideological induction into male sexual panic, or the hegemony of a racializing gender order at the turn of the twentieth century. Nero's interpretation of Jennie's assault (and her subsequent disappearance from the text) chafes against earlier interpretations that allege John Jones's murder of John Henderson as indebted to a tradition of white southern chivalry. Instead, Nero marshals Signithia Fordham's terminology of "gender integrity" to delimit how the murder of John Henderson resolves the challenge to John Jones's masculinity, going on to point out that "Du Bois [is] writing about race... [and] against a culture that turns him queer by excluding him from public heterosexuality" (Nero 271).

Cultural and religious criticism

Du Bois had transdisciplinary training and he provided a historical context for black religion and culture. His concept of "double-consciousness" and other concepts from Souls have been highly influential on other scholars in their interpretations of black culture and religion. Cheryl Sanders, a professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, lists a "who's who" of Du Bois progeny in her scholarly work, including Paul Gilroy, C. Eric Lincoln, Lawrence Mamiya, Peter Paris, Emilie Townes, and Cornel West. These are some of the scholars who take up themes or concepts found in Souls for their own work in religious and theological studies or cultural criticism. Additionally, Victor Anderson, a philosophical theologian and cultural critic at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, links concepts from Souls to much of the work in black religious studies.

In Beyond Ontological Blackness, Victor Anderson seeks to critique a trope of "black heroic genius" articulated within the logics of ontological blackness as a philosophy of racial consciousness. At the center of this conception is Du Bois.

Anderson says,

W. E. B. Du Bois's double-consciousness depiction of black existence has come to epitomize the existential determinants of black self-consciousness. These alienated forms of black consciousness have been categorically defined in African-American cultural studies as: The Negro Problem, The Color Line, Black Experience, Black Power, The Veil of Blackness, Black Radicalism, and most recently, The Black Sacred Cosmos.

Anderson's critique of black heroic genius and a move towards black cultural fulfillment is an attempt to move beyond the categories deployed by Du Bois in Souls.

Similarly, Sanders critiques Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness, especially in terms of interpreting black holiness-Pentecostalism. In Sanders's work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, Sanders deploys a dialectical understanding of exile, which she characterizes in black holiness-Pentecostal terms as "Being in the world, but not of it." At the same time, Sanders wishes to contrast this to the double-consciousness dialect of Du Bois, at least as she understands it. For Sanders, "exilic dialectics" is "hoped to represent a progressive step beyond the 'double-consciousness' described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, which persists as the dominant paradigm in African American religious and cultural thought."

Describing exilic consciousness as between "both-and", and double-consciousness as "either-or", Sanders says that those who live in exile "can find equilibrium and fulfillment between extremes, whereas adherents to the latter either demand resolution or suffer greatly in the tension, as is the case with Du Bois's description of the agony of 'double-consciousness,' as 'two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.'"

In 1953, The Souls of Black Folk was published in a special "Fiftieth Anniversary Jubilee Edition". In his introduction, Du Bois wrote that in the 50 years since its publication, he occasionally had the inclination to revise the book but ultimately decided to leave it as it was, "as a monument to what I thought and felt in 1903". While he stuck by his decision, he wrote that in the new edition he had made "less than a half-dozen alterations in word or phrase and then not to change my thoughts as previously set down but to avoid any possible misunderstanding today of what I meant to say yesterday."

In 1973, historian Herbert Aptheker identified seven changes between the editions. Historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a team of readers performed a line-by-line comparison of the two editions during the 1980s and identified two more changes. All the changes are minor; the longest was to change "nephews and poor whites and the Jews" to "poor relations and foreign immigrants". In six of the nine changes, Du Bois changed references to Jews to refer to immigrants or foreigners. Two of the other changes also involved references to Jews.

Du Bois wrote to Aptheker in February 1953 about concerns he had with his references to Jews in the book:

I have had a chance to read [ The Souls of Black Folk] in part for the first time in years. I find in chapters VII, VIII and IX, five incidental references to Jews. I recall that years ago, Jacob Schiff wrote me criticising these references and that I denied any thought of race or religious prejudice and promised to go over the passages in future editions. These editions succeeded each other without any consultation with me, and evidently the matter slipped out of my mind.
As I re-read these words today, I see that harm might come if they were allowed to stand as they are. First of all, I am not at all sure that the foreign exploiters to whom I referred ... were in fact Jews.... But even if they were, what I was condemning was the exploitation and not the race nor religion. And I did not, when writing, realize that by stressing the name of the group instead of what some members of the [group] may have done, I was unjustly maligning a people in exactly the same way my folk were then and are now falsely accused.
In view of this and because of the even greater danger of injustice now than then, I want in the event of re-publication [to] change those passages.

In a March 1953 letter to Blue Heron Press, Du Bois asked that the following paragraph be added to the end of "Of the Black Belt":

In the foregoing chapter, "Jews" have been mentioned five times, and the late Jacob Schiff once complained that this gave an impression of anti-Semitism. This at the time I stoutly denied; but as I read the passages again in the light of subsequent history, I see how I laid myself open to this possible misapprehension. What, of course, I meant to condemn was the exploitation of black labor and that it was in this country and at that time in part a matter of immigrant Jews, was incidental and not essential. My inner sympathy with the Jewish people was expressed better in the last paragraph of page 152. But this illustrates how easily one slips into unconscious condemnation of a whole group.

The publisher did not add the paragraph, possibly because Du Bois changed the text instead.

Aberjhani (ed.), The Wisdom of W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Citadel Press/Kensington Books, 2013.

Adams, Katherine. "Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value." American Literary History 31.4 (2019): 715-740.

Gates, Henry Louis, and Terri Hume Oliver (eds), The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999.

Gibson, Donald B., "Introduction" to The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Kenan, Randall, "Introduction" to The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1995.

Richardson, Mark. The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written Along the Color Line (pages 73-109). Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2019. ISBN 9781571132390

Shaw, Stephanie J., W. E. B. Du Bois and "The Souls of Black Folk." Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

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The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature. The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly .

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I find this picture to be beneficial to learning who Du Bois is as it shows him (on the right) graduating from Harvard. This picture shows his level of education and that Du Bois was an intellectual. Also, Du Bois was one of the first black people to graduate from Harvard.

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Political magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois

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I chose this picture because according to the web this is Du Bois most successful book and piece of work written in 1903.

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This video really helps understanding this character and concisely explains what he did and what legacies he left. If you are new to this topic I would recommend watching the video that perfectly summarises the main points of W.E.B Du Bois life.

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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Transcript

Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois? W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, editor, and pioneer of Black activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. BORN Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Massachusetts as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. BELIEFS As a Ph.D. candidate and then as a professor, Du Bois originally believed sociological study would provide the knowledge to solve the race problem in the United States. In the face of segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching, he changed his mind: he came to believe that the only solution to the evils of racism was active protest. WRITING In his famous book "The Souls of Black Folk," Du Bois pushed back against conservatives like Booker T. Washington, who believed Black Americans should temporarily accept segregation. He also wrote about Black participation in Reconstruction, Marxism, and his position as a Black activist. ORGANIZING In 1905 Du Bois became a leader of the Niagara Movement, an important precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After the NAACP was founded in 1909, Du Bois served as director of research and editor of its magazine, "The Crisis." DEATH W.E.B. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana. By the end of his life, he was completely disillusioned with the United States. He died a Ghanaian citizen. "Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense." -W.E.B. Du Bois

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Learn about the career of W.E.B. Du Bois, the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

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Who is Du Bois, a better understanding for kids.

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Who is Du Bois, a better understanding for kids.

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This is a Video that I found that as it said, of it being facts for kids I think as an itroduction for teens is very good as well. It not necesarily for kids in my opinion even though its tought by kids in parts, but its an eassier way to get in the topic.

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Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois | Black History Month Facts for Kids

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This article is useful as it gives a general run down of the book "The Souls of Black Folk" and its main ideas, one of Du Bois' most influential works.

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W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a seminal work in African American literature and an American classic. In this work Du Bois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these enduring concepts, Souls offers an assessment of the progress of the race, the obstacles to that progress, and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century.

Du Bois examines the years immediately following the Civil War and, in particular, the Freedmen's Bureau's role in Reconstruction. The Bureau's failures were due not only to southern opposition and "national neglect," but also to mismanagement and courts that were biased "in favor of black litigants." The Bureau did have successes as well, and its most important contribution to progress was the founding of African American schools. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1876, Du Bois claims that the most significant event in African American history has been the rise of the educator, Booker T. Washington, to the role of spokesman for the race. Du Bois argues that Washington's approach to race relations is counterproductive to the long-term progress of the race. Washington's acceptance of segregation and his emphasis on material progress represent an "old attitude of adjustment and submission." Du Bois asserts that this policy has damaged African Americans by contributing to the loss of the vote, the loss of civil status, and the loss of aid for institutions of higher education. Du Bois insists that "the right to vote," "civic equality," and "the education of youth according to ability" are essential for African American progress.

Du Bois relates his experiences as a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, and then he turns his attention to a critique of American materialism in the rising city of Atlanta where the single-minded attention to gaining wealth threatens to replace all other considerations. In terms of education, African Americans should not be taught merely to earn money. Rather, Du Bois argues there should be a balance between the "standards of lower training" and the "standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life." In effect, the African American college should train the "Talented Tenth" who can in turn contribute to lower education and also act as liaisons in improving race relations.

Du Bois returns to an examination of rural African American life with a presentation of Dougherty County, Georgia as representative of life in the southern Black Belt. He presents the history and current conditions of the county. Cotton is still the life-blood of the Black Belt economy, and few African Americans are enjoying any economic success. Du Bois describes the legal system and tenant farming system as only slightly removed from slavery. He also examines African American religion from its origins in African society, through its development in slavery, to the formation of the Baptist and Methodist churches. He argues that "the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history." He goes on to examine the impact of slavery on morality.

In the last chapters of his book, Du Bois concentrates on how racial prejudice impacts individuals. He mourns the loss of his baby son, but he wonders if his son is not better off dead than growing up in a world dominated by the color-line. Du Bois relates the story of Alexander Crummel, who struggled against prejudice in his attempts to become an Episcopal priest. In "Of the Coming of John," Du Bois presents the story of a young black man who attains an education. John's new knowledge, however, places him at odds with a southern community, and he is destroyed by racism. Finally, Du Bois concludes his book with an essay on African American spirituals. These songs have developed from their African origins into powerful expressions of the sorrow, pain, and exile that characterize the African American experience. For Du Bois, these songs exist "not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas."

Andrew Leiter

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Summary of The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches

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W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a seminal work in African American literature and an American classic. In this work Du Bois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."

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This link shows us the many events that occured in Du Bois' lifetime, showing us who he used to be, as well as who he eventually became. Not only that, it shows the many beliefs he had and tells us a lot about him as an individual and his personality.

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W.E.B. Du Bois' Childhood

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, Du Bois' birth certificate has his name as "William E. Duboise." Two years after his birth his father, Alfred Du Bois, left his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt.

Du Bois became the first person in his extended family to attend high school, and did so at his mother's insistence. In 1883, Du Bois began to write articles for papers like the New York Globe and the Freeman.

Education of W.E.B. Dubois

Du Bois initially attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a school for Black students. His tuition was paid by several churches in Great Barrington. Du Bois became an editor for the Herald, the student magazine.

After graduation, Du Bois attended Harvard University, starting in 1888 and eventually receiving advanced degrees in history. In 1892, Du Bois worked towards a Ph.D. at the University of Berlin until his funding ran out.

He returned to the United States without his doctorate but later received one from Harvard while teaching classics at Wilberforce University in Ohio. There, he married Nina Gomer, one of his students, in 1896.

His doctoral thesis, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870," became his first book and a standard in American education covering slavery.

The Philadelphia Negro

Du Bois took a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 conducting a study of the city's Seventh Ward, published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro. The work took up so much of his time that he missed the birth of his first son in Great Barrington.

The study is considered one of the earliest examples of statistical work being used for sociological purposes, with extensive fieldwork resulting in hundreds of interviews conducted door-to-door by Du Bois.

Mapping out the Seventh Ward and carefully documenting familial and work structures, Du Bois concluded that the Black community's greatest challenges were poverty, crime, lack of education and distrust of those outside the community.

W.E.B. Du Bois' Sociological Studies

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offered Du Bois a job in 1897, leading to several groundbreaking studies on Black Southern households in Farmville, Virginia, that uncovered how slavery still affected the personal lives of African Americans. Du Bois would do four more studies for the bureau, two in Alabama and two in Georgia.

These studies were considered radical at the time when sociology existed in pure theoretical forms. Du Bois was pivotal in making investigation and data analysis crucial to sociological study.

During the same period, Du Bois wrote "The Strivings of the Negro People" for the Atlantic Monthly, a groundbreaking essay that explained to white readers how it feels to be a victim of racism. It is considered the general public's introduction to Du Bois.

'The Souls of Black Folk'

Du Bois and family moved to Atlanta University, where he taught sociology and worked on his additional Bureau of Labor Statistics studies.

Among the books written during this period was The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of sociological essays examining the Black experience in America. Partially derived from his Atlantic article, it embraced Du Bois' personal history in his arguments.

The book also introduced the idea of "double consciousness," in which African Americans are required to consider not only their view of themselves but also the view that the world, particularly whites, has on them during all parts of life. It also expressly differentiated Du Bois from more conservative Black voices like Booker T. Washington.

In 1899, Du Bois' son Burghardt contracted diphtheria and died after Du Bois spent the night looking for one of three Black doctors in Atlanta, since no white doctor would treat the child. A resulting essay, "The Passing of the First Born," appeared in The Souls of Black Folk.

The Niagara Movement And Booker T. Washington

In 1903, Du Bois taught summer school at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee University, but friction between the two men led to Du Bois joining Washington's rivals in the Niagara Movement, charged with seeking justice and equality for African Americans.

That group failed, partly due to opposition from Washington, but during its existence Du Bois published The Moon Illustrated Weekly, the first weekly magazine for African Americans, producing a total of 34 issues before folding in 1906. He followed this up briefly with the journal Horizon.
READ MORE: The Niagara Movement
NAACP

In 1910, Du Bois accepted the directorship of the recently-formed NAACP. He moved to New York City and served as the editor of the organization's monthly magazine The Crisis.

The magazine was a huge success and became very influential, covering race relations and black culture with Du Bois' forthright style. The magazine stood out for its continual endorsement and coverage of women's suffrage. Du Bois worked for the NAACP for 24 years, during which time he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

After a brief second stint at Atlanta University, Du Bois returned to the NAACP as director of special research in 1944 and represented the organization at the first meeting of the United Nations.

Du Bois also became more interested in communism and international issues, and became an open supporter of progressive and left-wing groups, which created problems with NAACP leadership. He left the organization again in 1948.

W.E.B. Du Bois and Communism

Du Bois' radicalism continued in the public sphere, running as the Progressive Party's candidate for Senate in 1950 and losing. He and other members of the Peace Information Center were charged as agents of a foreign principal, inspired by the organization's Soviet leanings, but were acquitted in a trial in 1951.

Following the death of his wife in 1950, Du Bois married Shirley Graham the following year. Graham's interest led Du Bois further into exploring communism, delving into the American Communist community and becoming known for his apologetic view of Joseph Stalin.

In 1961 Du Bois officially joined the American Communist Party before leaving the country to live in Ghana at the invitation of its president and becoming a citizen there.

Encyclopedia Africana

Du Bois first conceived of the Encyclopedia Africana in 1908 as a compendium of history and achievement of people of African descent designed to bring a sense of unity to the African diaspora. Unable to raise the needed funds, Du Bois wasn't able to revisit the project until 1935, but it was disrupted by professional battles.

Du Bois published some entries from the proposed encyclopedia and even editions of research material, but it wasn't until 1962 that a further promise was made to complete the encyclopedia.

After Du Bois was invited to move to Ghana, he pledged to finally publish the work, but it was never realized before his death. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963 in Ghana and was given a state funeral.
READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline
Sources

W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. Harvard University.

DuBoisopedia. University of Massachusetts.

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868 - 1919. David Levering Lewis.

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W. E. B. Du Bois - Beliefs, Niagara Movement & NAACP | HISTORY

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W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a civil rights activist who led the Niagara Movement and later helped form the NAACP.

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This is a web within quotes of his. Many of them might leave in wonder or could be debatable of if you agree or not with him. I found intresting.

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In November 2020, friends of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center shared a series of quotes by Du Bois that resonate in our own time.

The quotes below were chosen by the 2019 cohort of Du Bois Center graduate and post-doctoral fellows.

Group portrait of Du Bois and friends and family at his 70th birthday celebration at Atlanta University, 1938.

Du Bois Center Fellows Favorite Du Bois Quotes

Portrait taken by writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten.

Viewing anniversary parade from balcony of ancient Royal Palace in Peking, Oct. 1, 1962.

"I believe in pride of race and lineage and self; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves."
W. E. B. Du Bois
Chosen by Samantha Davis, Doctoral student in Political Science at UMass Amherst and 2019 Du Bois Center Graduate Fellow

Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois seated in study holding newspaper.

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935)

W. E. B. Du Bois in his office holding the first issue of The Crisis.

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The quotes below were chosen by the 2019 cohort of Du Bois Center graduate and post-doctoral fellows. Du Bois Center Fellows Favorite Du Bois Quotes "I believe in pride of race and lineage and self; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves." W. E.

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I find this picture interesting as it shows Du Bois being arrested and the reason is because he was fighting for "Negro rights".

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this is one of his most famous quotes, I like it as he is talking about time and that we shouldn't wait to do something good but we should do it now

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This video introduces us to W.E.B Du Bois and talk about who he was .

Du Bois was an African American activist that defended the black peoples rights , he unfluenced a lot of people and now he is known internationally.

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“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.” this wise quote by Du Bois shows us how it never too late to follow your dreams.

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"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."