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1.In your view, does DuBois present “double consciousness” more negatively (as a burden to be overcome) or more positively (as a special gift of black experience to be cherished, embraced, and utilized)?2.Does DuBois’s essay support cultural assimilation? Why or why not?3.Fill in the blank: The dominant emotion of Dunbar’s poem is “_______________.” What specific images, word choices, passages, etc., support your answer?4.Does Dunbar’s poem document a process of cultural assimilation? cultural resistance? a mix of the two?5.What are some possible similarities or connections between Dunbar’s image of the mask and DuBois’s theory of the veil?
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W.EB.DuBois • 943
learns to cheat a white man out of his, and that the man who does this ends his career of dishonesty by the theft of property or by some equally serious crime. In my
opinion, the time will come when the South will encourage all of its citizens to vote.
It will see that it pays better, from every standpoint, to have healthy, vigorous life than
to have that political stagnation which always results when one-half of the population has no share and no interest in the Government.
As a rule, I believe in universal, free suffrage, but I believe that in the South we
are confronted with peculiar conditions that justify the protection of the ballot in
many of the states, for a while at least, either by an educational test, a property test,
or by both combined; but whatever tests are required, they should be made to apply
with equal and exact justice to both races.
1901
W.E.B. Du Bois 1868-1963
.’«
>J
At the turn of the 20th century, William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the most outspoken civil rights activist in America,
committed himself to a style of political
leadership which emphasized that, in order for African-Americans to survive the
inordinate stress and cruelty of racial discrimination, they had to make a “. . . determined attempt at self-development,
self-realization, in spite of environing
discouragement and prejudice.” The style
called upon African-Americans to seek full
exercise of civil rights in the United States
through militant protest and agitation.
Du Bois’s posture met with little popularity, for it was at the time that the nation
had witnessed the undermining of the “Reconstruction Amendments”—which had
given blacks the legal prerogatives’ of the
vote, access to public facilities and services, and equal rights under the law—by
the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v.
Fergusson or the “separate but equal” doctrine. Rayford W. Logan, a noted historian,
called the ensuing period of disfranchisement the “nadir” and betrayal of AfricanAmerican citizenship in the United States.
Some observers, therefore, preferred the
more conciliatory posture of Booker T.
Washington, Du Bois’s rival, who believed
that rather than agitating outright for their
rights, African-Americans should first earn
white respect through property ownership, sacrifice, and self-restraint. Others
believed that any activism by AfricanAmericans would cause an increase in the
physical abuses against them. Nevertheless, Du Bois was undaunted in his conviction that, despite the Court’s ruling in
Plessy v. Fergusson, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the
United States were documents of entitlement and that the struggle of AfricanAmericans was a struggle for securing
basic human and civil rights for all Americans. Hence, for Du Bois, the turn-of-thecentury nadir signaled social and political
conditions for blacks which made protest
an absolute necessity.
Du Bois’s political idealism was a
product of his childhood observations of
and participation in the civic activities of
his home town and of his formal education
in the 19th-century disciplines of history
and sociology, both of which held firm to a
belief in human progress and the perfectibility of man in society. Born in Great
Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, Du
Bois grew up in a typical New England
small-town environment, where social and
economic activities were reinforced by
strong traditions in “primary democracy”:
944 • Modern Period: 1910-1945
all of its citizens had a right to be heard.
The people of Great Harrington considered their community to be one with a
moral purpose; thus, assuming social responsibility was an integral part of civic
life. Having grown up in such an environment, Du Bois had little direct experience
with the social, political, and economic exclusion of blacks before he went south to
attend Fisk University in 1885. He later
wrote, “From a section and circumstance
where the status of me and my folk could
be rationalized as the result of poverty and
limited training, and settled essentially by
schooling and hard effort, I suddenly came
to a region where the world was split into
white and black halves, and where the
darker half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds. . . . ” Three years in
the South provided him a perspective on
racial prejudice and convinced him that he
would devote his life to bringing about
change.
After graduating from Fisk University,
Du Bois went to Harvard, 1888 to 1892,
where he completed a second baccalaureate degree in philosophy and a masters degree in history. He studied philosophy with
William James, George Santayana, and
Josiah Royce, whose thoughts on individualism, community, pragmatism, and the
use of ideas to promote social change influenced Du Bois’s thinking throughout
his long career as an activist and writer.
Perhaps most influential to his career,
however, was his study of American history
at Harvard with Albert Bushnel] Hart and
two years further study of social science
methodology at the University of Berlin
(1892-94). His advanced study of both
disciplines led to his earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard and the distinction of having his dissertation, The Suppression of the
Slave Trade in the United States of America,
published as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies in 1896.
The new social science held that one
should seek the “truth” of the human history through an examination of a range of
historical documents: the Congressional
Record, the census, newspapers, private
papers, and so forth. Study of such primary
sources would allow the scholar to write
a comprehensive view of any historical
era or issue. During the initial period of
his career, Du Bois utilized the new social science methodology as a researcher
and teacher at Wilberforce University
(1894-96), the University of Pennsylvania
(1897), and Atlanta University (18971910). Between 1896 and 1905, he conducted studies of the urbanization of
blacks in the North (The Philadelphia Negro) and the social organization of blacks
in the rural South (The Atlanta University
Publications). By 1900, however, having
declared that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color
line,” he realized that his scholarly work
reached a limited audience. While his
books were considered pioneering efforts
in African-American affairs, they did little
to change the reality of everyday life; the
rigidly objective writing of the social sciences failed to capture the spirit of its subjects. The color line, he believed, was so
exclusionary that it deprived people of
color throughout the world of even a modicum of self-respect and pride. American
scholars in most disciplines either ignored
blacks altogether or wrote about them in
ways that reinforced negative stereotypes.
Hence, he began experimenting with the
literary forms in search of containers, as it
were, for a kind of literature which portrayed the African-American’s social and
cultural distinctiveness in ways the social
sciences did not. Many of his experimental
works—essays, poems, short stories, plays,
dramatic sketches, and so on—were published in two magazines which he edited,
The Moon (1906) and The Horizon
(1907-10). The poem “The Song of the
Smoke,” for example, was first published
in The Horizon (February, 1907); and, in
many respects, its theme is characteristic of
Du Bois’s early work: an assertion of a positive disposition toward blackness for its
W.E.B. Du Bois ‘ 945
beauty, its creativity and its service to and Europe. He was recognized for his
mankind.
scholarship and literary contributions;
Du Bois also realized as early as 1900 and The Crisis magazine, which he edited,
that organized collective action by black was required reading in many Africanpeople needed an institutional structure in American households and schools. In that
order to be effective. In 1905, he was the same year, however, Du Bois was fired
principal founder of the Niagara Move- from his post with the NAACP because he
ment, a civil rights protest organization, in advocated use of segregation as a strategy
opposition to Booker T. Washington’s con- for binding blacks into a cohesive group
ciliatory posture of accommodating racial during the worst of the Depression years.
discrimination. The organization called for Other officials of the organization felt such
direct action against racial discrimination a strategy was against the NAACP’s basic
through protest, through the use of the mission: seeking an integrated society.
courts, and through education of the While Du Bois’s strategy is little underAmerican people. Four years later, he was stood, nevertheless it remains the primary
a principal organizer of the National Asso- reason cited for his departure from the
ciation for the Advancement of Colored civil rights organization which he helped to
People (NAACP). Its mission was identi- found and to which he gave direction.
cal to that of the Niagara Movement but its
Although Du Bois returned to the
membership included both blacks and NAACP as Director of Special Research
whites. From 1910 to 1934, as the NAACP from 1944 to 1948, 1934 marked the end
Director of Publicity and Research and ed- of his influence in the organization and in
itor of its magazine (The Crisis), he com- the affairs of African-American letters. Albined his experimentation in literature, his ready a world leader by 1900, Du Bois dedunderstanding of American culture, and icated his post-1934 years almost excluthe rhetoric of protest. He was, for nearly a sively to world affairs. For almost two
quarter century, the undisputed intellec- decades, to his death, he was identified as
tual leader of a new generation of African- a sympathizer with world peace movements. In 1963, he became a citizen of
Americans.
By 1934, William Du Bois was a well- Ghana, where he died in August of the
known name throughout the United States same year.
and among social, political, and intellecFrederick Woodard
tual leaders in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia,
University of Iowa
PRIMARY WORKS
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1896; The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 1899; Atlanta University Studies on the American Negro, 19 volumes published between 1897 and 1915; The Souls of Black Folk, I903;]ohn Brown, 1909; The
Quest of the Silver Fleece, 1911; The Star of Ethiopia, 1913; The Negro, 1916; Darkwater, 1920;
The Gift of the Negro, 1924; Dark Princess: Voices from Within the Veil, 1928; Black Reconstruction, 1935; Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 1940;
Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, 1945; The World and Africa, 1947; The Black
Flame—A Trilogy: The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color, 1957,
1959 and 1961.
SECONDARY WORKS
Francis L. Broderick, W.E.B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis, 1959; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1976; William L. Andrews, Critical Essays
on W.E.B. Du Bois, 1985.
946 • Modern Period: 1910-1945
from The Souls of Black Folk
I
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there never shall be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
-ARTHUR SYMONS
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some
through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All,
nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me
curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to
be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at
Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these
‘The musical epigraph is taken from the spiritual, “Nobody Know the Trouble I’ve Seen,”
whose message of striving and salvation is
translated into secular terms in Du Bois’s chapter: “Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down,/
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground./ Oh, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen . . . ” The
chapter’s famous passage on the veil that yields
black men and women “no true self consciousness” may also be compared to the song’s second verse: “One day when I was walking along,
Oh yes, Lord—/ The element opened, and the
Love came down, Oh yes Lord.” There were
numerous collections of spirituals at the turn of
the century, but the musicological evidence
suggests that Du Bois probably took his examples from J.B.T. Marsh, The Story ofthe]ubilee
Singers (1872), and M. F. Armstrong and Helen
W. Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students, with
Fifty Cabin and Plantation Songs, arranged by
Thomas P. Fenner (1874). Some of the songs
mentioned in Chapter 14, “Of the Sorrow
Songs,” had been commented on by earlier collectors of spirituals such as William Allen in
Slave Songs in the United States (1867). The
most complete compilation in the early twentieth century was James Weldon Johnson and
Rosamond Tohnson’s two-volume Book of
American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926).
Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk • 947
I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a
word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who
has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the
early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day,
as it were. I remember well yhenthe shadow swept acrossme^ I was a little thing,
away up in the hills of New England, where the TIark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it
into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—
and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and
life and longing, but shut out from their world by^i vast_yejl I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them jUjt.,
foot-race, or even beat their stringyheads. Alas, withlKe years aTTthis fine contempt
began to fade; tor the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were
theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would
wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by
healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into
tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking
distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me
an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades^thejrison -house) closed
round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow,
tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat
unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of
blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a.veil; jnd_giftgdwith_second-sight
in this American world,—a_world vyhichjyjelds him nojrue_sglf-consciousness, but
only lets himsee himseTf through the revglation^of the jithgrjworld. It is a peculiar
sensation, this ^double-consciousness, [this sense of always TooEIng 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. One ever feels his two-ness.—an_Arnerican, a Negro; two souls, twothoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warringideajsinone
ctark body, whos£doggedjtrength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.2″
~^ The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to
attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not
2
This passage is often referred to as Du Bois’s
theory of the “double-consciousness.” It is a
“gift of second-sight” but it is also a curse of
ambivalence.
948 • Modern Period: 1910-1945
bleach the Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro
blood has a message for the world. 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.
This, then, is the end of his striving: toj3e_a_co-workejMnjh^^
to escape both death and isolation, to husband and useThis best powers and his latent
genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of
Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the
world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since
Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful
striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of
power, like weakness. And yet itjs not weakness,—-itisthe contradiction of double
aims. The double-aimed struggle_of the black artisan—on the one hand tojgcape
white contempt foranation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the
other hand to plough and nail and dig~for a poverty-stricken horde—uld only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the
poverty and ignorance of his people, ffHe’N’egro minister or doctofr was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals
that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. T!be woiflcFBe black savafTtyjas confronted
by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his
white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek
to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony_and beauty_that jet the ruder,
souls of his peoplea-dancing and a-singmg nusgdjbut confusion and doubt in the soul
ofthe black artist;Tprthe beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty ofa_race whicn
his larger audience despis_ed. and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand
people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation,
and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the
end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half
such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far
as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the’sum of all villainies, the cause of
all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and
exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a
dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own
plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national
life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its ac-
.
Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk • 949
customed
seat
at the-‘(>,
PRIMARY WORKS
Oak and Ivy, 1893; Majors and Minors, 1896; Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896; folks from Dixie,
1898; The Uncalled, 1898; Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899; The Strength of Gideon and Other
Stones, 1900; The Love of’Landry, 1900; The Fanatics, 1901; The Sport of the Gods, 1902; Lyrics
of Love and Laughter, 1903; In Old Plantation Days, 1903; The Heart of Happy Hollow, 1904;
Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 1905. •
‘,’•
[‘eft-til
SECONDARY WORKS
Lida Keck Wiggins, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1907; Alice Moore DunbarNelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet Laureate of the Negro Race, 1914; Benjamin Brawley, Paul
Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People, 1936; Victor Lawson, Dunbar Critically Examined, 1941;
Virginia Cunningham, Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song, 1947; Jean Gould, That Dunbar
Boy, 1958; Addison Gayle, Jr., Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 197.1; Jay
Martin, ed., A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1975; Peter Revell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1979.
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
5
. •
Why should the world be over-wise,,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
10
15
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
1896
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