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Du Bois
1903
The book that named the problem of the twentieth century.
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois · 1903
In 1903, Du Bois gave the color-line its sharpest formulation and coined double-consciousness to describe what it costs to live behind it — language that still does real work in how Americans talk about race. It's also the founding document of the Washington–Du Bois debate over strategy that still echoes in arguments about uplift, respectability, and political power, and it closes by making the case that the Sorrow Songs are not folklore but the nation's only original art.
16 chapters · 68,401 words · ~5.2 hr read
Contents
Forethought
Du Bois states his subject — the problem of the color-line — before he begins.
The Veil and the Color-Line
Double-consciousness, Reconstruction's betrayal, and the break with Booker T. Washington.
Education, Progress, and Atlanta
What progress costs one family, Atlanta's temptation toward Mammon, and the case for liberal education.
Life in the Black Belt
Land, debt, and the color-line at work in Georgia's plantation country and beyond.
Faith, Grief, and a Story Twice Told
The Black church, a father's mourning, a portrait of hard-won dignity, and a short story of two men named John.
The Sorrow Songs and After-Thought
The spirituals as evidence and art, and a closing prayer that the book not fall still-born into the world.