The Souls of Black Folk

Glossary

A

Alexander Crummell: The Black Episcopal clergyman and scholar to whom Du Bois devotes a full chapter as a model of dignified Black leadership. Denied entry to the General Theological Seminary and later told by Bishop Onderdonk that he could be ordained in Pennsylvania only if he agreed never to sit in diocesan convention, Crummell refused and spent decades in poverty, in England, and in Africa before returning, in Du Bois's telling, "humble and strong, gentle and determined." Du Bois structures his life as a triumph over three temptations — Hate, Despair, and Doubt — and two crossings, the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.; Related: The Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, The Veil
Atlanta University: The Black college in Atlanta where Du Bois taught and lived, and which he holds up as the model of the higher, liberal education he argues for throughout the book. He describes its campus as a "restful group" where students pursue "old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth" rather than narrow bread-winning skills, comparing its curriculum to "the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato." For Du Bois, Atlanta University and its sister institutions — Fisk, Howard — are what can guide the New South's "Atalanta" past the temptation of gold alone toward "the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity."; Related: The Wings of Atalanta, The Talented Tenth, Fisk University

B

Booker T. Washington: The founder of Tuskegee Institute and, in Du Bois's account, "the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876" — a leader who built a program of industrial education, conciliation of the white South, and public silence on civil and political rights into "a veritable Way of Life." Du Bois credits Washington's "enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith," and acknowledges instances where Washington quietly opposed injustice, while arguing that his program's "triple paradox" — asking property-owners to forgo the vote, asking for self-respect while counseling submission, and depending on college-trained teachers while disparaging higher education — could not deliver what it promised.; Related: The Atlanta Compromise, The Washington–Du Bois Debate, Tuskegee Institute, Frederick Douglass
Burghardt Du Bois: Du Bois's infant son, born in 1897 and dead before his second birthday, whose brief life and death are the subject of "Of the Passing of the First-Born," the most personal chapter in the book. Du Bois describes his grief alongside a terrible, almost unspeakable relief that death had spared his son a lifetime lived behind the Veil: "no bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death." The chapter refuses to resolve that contradiction, ending instead in a father's unbowed but unhealed sorrow.; Related: The Veil, W. E. B. Du Bois (Narrator)

D

Disenfranchisement: The systematic stripping of the Black vote across the South in the years following Reconstruction's end, which Du Bois lists as the first of three consequences that followed the years of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist ascendancy: "the disfranchisement of the Negro," alongside "the legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority" and the "steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro." Du Bois argues no amount of economic striving can substitute for the ballot, since "it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage."; Related: The Revolution of 1876, The Washington–Du Bois Debate, Booker T. Washington
Double-Consciousness: Du Bois's term for the divided self-perception forced on Black Americans, who must see themselves "through the eyes of others," measuring their souls "by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." He describes it as "a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," leaving "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." Du Bois's stated hope is not to lose either self but to "merge his double self into a better and truer self," becoming both a Negro and an American without being "cursed and spit upon."; Related: The Veil, The Color-Line
Dougherty County: The Georgia county — encompassing the town of Albany, on the Flint River — that Du Bois selects as his case study of the Black Belt in both "Of the Black Belt" and "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece." Home to roughly ten thousand Black and two thousand white residents at the time of his visit, it had been, before the war, one of the richest cotton-slavery regions in the South, "the Egypt of the Confederacy"; by the time Du Bois rides its roads, much of that wealth has collapsed into debt, tenancy, and ruined plantations. He uses its farms, churches, and families as a detailed, ground-level portrait of what freedom had and had not delivered a generation after Emancipation.; Related: The Black Belt, The Crop-Lien System, The Cotton Kingdom

F

Fisk Jubilee Singers: The student singing group formed at Fisk University in the 1870s under George L. White, a Union veteran and Freedmen's Bureau worker whose Nashville Sunday-school class of Black children first taught him the spirituals. Beginning in 1871, the "four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women" toured through cold, hunger, and repeated exclusion from hotels until their performances won recognition at Oberlin and in New York, eventually singing before European royalty and raising, in Du Bois's account, "a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University." Du Bois credits them with carrying the Sorrow Songs, previously "half forgotten," permanently into the world's hearing.; Related: The Sorrow Songs, Fisk University
Fisk University: One of the Black colleges founded in Nashville, Tennessee in the years after the Civil War, and, alongside Atlanta and Howard, Du Bois's model of the liberal higher education he argues Black Americans need. Du Bois notes it "started her college in 1871," making it one of the earliest to move beyond common-school and normal-school instruction; it is also where the Fisk Jubilee Singers first formed and toured to fund the school. Du Bois himself studied at Fisk before continuing his education at Harvard and in Germany, and the university recurs throughout the book as both his personal touchstone and proof that Black students could master a demanding classical curriculum.; Related: Atlanta University, The Talented Tenth, Fisk Jubilee Singers, The Sorrow Songs
Forty Acres and a Mule: Du Bois's phrase for the promise, embodied briefly in Sherman's Field Order Number Fifteen setting aside abandoned coastal land for freed families, that Emancipation would come with real landownership. He calls it "the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen," and treats its abandonment — when the government reclaimed and returned confiscated land to former owners — as one of Reconstruction's deepest betrayals, foreclosing the possibility of a Black landowning peasantry across the South.; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, The Black Belt, General Oliver O. Howard
Frederick Douglass: The formerly enslaved abolitionist and orator whom Du Bois calls "the greatest of American Negro leaders," a figure of unbroken "self-assertion" who led Black political life from before the Civil War until his death in 1895. Du Bois traces a line of Black leadership from Douglass's insistence on "ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms" through to Booker T. Washington's very different program of conciliation, using Douglass as the standard against which he measures Washington's turn toward submission and silence on civil rights.; Related: Booker T. Washington, The Washington–Du Bois Debate

G

General Oliver O. Howard: The Union general, veteran of Gettysburg and Sherman's march to the sea, whom Lincoln's successor appointed Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 at age thirty-five. Du Bois describes him as "an honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail," who nonetheless inherited an almost impossible task: building a government for four million newly freed people with no congressional appropriation and a staff drawn largely from an army still fighting a war. Howard was later court-martialed over the Bureau's finances and exonerated, an episode Du Bois treats as evidence of how thanklessly the Bureau's work was received once its usefulness to the nation had passed.; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, The Freedmen's Bank

I

Industrial Education: The model of vocational, trade-based schooling — as opposed to liberal, college-level study — that rose to prominence in Southern Black education from the mid-1880s onward and became the centerpiece of Booker T. Washington's program. Du Bois does not reject it outright, granting that the industrial school was "the proffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer of singular wisdom and timeliness," but he insists it could not have existed without the liberal colleges that came first: it was the graduates of Fisk, Atlanta, and Howard who, in a single generation, "put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and, as he puts it, "made Tuskegee possible." For Du Bois, industrial training and liberal education are sequential and interdependent, not competing alternatives.; Related: The Talented Tenth, Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, Atlanta University

J

Josie: A young woman Du Bois met while teaching school for two summers in rural Tennessee, a daughter of the Dowell family and, in his account, the "centre" of her household — hardworking, restless with "the longing to know," and eager to attend school in Nashville. When Du Bois returns a decade later he learns Josie has died, worn down by work, family hardship, and a poverty that never let her reach the education she wanted. Du Bois uses her story to ask what "progress" actually costs a family when it is measured in a human life rather than a statistic: "How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?"; Related: The Color-Line, The Black Belt

O

Of the Sons of Master and Man: Du Bois's phrase, drawn from his chapter of that title, for the daily, unequal contact between Black and white Southerners in the years after slavery — in housing, work, courts, and politics. He maps recurring forms of contact (physical proximity, economic relations, political relations, intellectual exchange, social contact, and religion) and argues that segregation ensures "the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity," so each race mostly sees the worst of the other. The chapter is Du Bois's most systematic account of how the color-line actually operates hour by hour, rather than as abstract law.; Related: The Color-Line, The Black Belt, The Jim Crow Car

T

The Atlanta Compromise: The name Du Bois gives to Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition address, in which Washington declared that Black and white Southerners could remain "as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Du Bois calls it "by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington's career," noting that Southern radicals read it as a surrender of civil and political equality while conservatives read it as a basis for mutual understanding. Du Bois credits its author with real achievement while arguing that its price — trading the ballot, civil rights, and higher education for industrial training and peace — asked Black Americans to give up too much.; Related: Booker T. Washington, The Washington–Du Bois Debate, Tuskegee Institute
The Black Belt: The crescent of rich, dark-soiled counties across the Deep South — Du Bois travels its Georgia heartland, Dougherty County and the town of Albany — where slavery had been most concentrated and where, a generation after Emancipation, Black tenant farmers still worked land they did not own under crushing debt. Du Bois calls it "that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past," and uses his county-by-county, family-by-family survey to measure what freedom actually delivered on the ground where the plantation system's physical and economic wreckage still stood. It is both a geographic fact and, for Du Bois, the truest testing ground of Reconstruction's promises.; Related: Dougherty County, The Crop-Lien System, The Cotton Kingdom, The Color-Line
The Color-Line: Du Bois's central thesis, stated in the Forethought and repeated at the close of "Of the Dawn of Freedom": "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." The entire book, he explains, is an attempt to sketch "the strange meaning of being black" within and beneath that line — in schooling, in the courts, in the church, in the cotton fields, and in a father's grief. It names both a global historical condition and the specific, daily texture of segregation and disenfranchisement Du Bois documents chapter by chapter.; Related: The Veil, Double-Consciousness, The Black Belt
The Cotton Kingdom: Du Bois's name, echoing the antebellum term, for the cotton economy that still ruled the postwar Black Belt and, through the crop-lien system, still profited from Black labor without freeing it from want. In "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece," Du Bois likens the harvest-white cotton fields to the Golden Fleece of Greek myth, noting that although cotton mills had spread across the New South, "the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes." The chapter argues that emancipation changed who worked the cotton, but not, for most Black farmers, how little they kept of what they grew.; Related: The Crop-Lien System, The Black Belt, Dougherty County
The Crop-Lien System: The credit arrangement that bound Black tenant farmers of the postwar Black Belt to debt even as legally free men, under which farmers borrowed against an unplanted cotton crop and, after the harvest, frequently ended the year owing more than they had earned. Du Bois opens "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece" by naming debt "the keynote of the Black Belt" — "not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued inability... to make income cover expense" — and traces it to the collapse of slavery-era land values after the war and the decades-long fall in cotton prices that followed. He presents the system as slavery's direct economic afterlife, a cage built of contracts rather than chains.; Related: The Black Belt, The Cotton Kingdom, Dougherty County
The Freedmen's Bank: The savings institution chartered by the federal government alongside the Freedmen's Bureau, carrying "the prestige of the government back of it" and meant to teach thrift to people newly freed from slavery. Its collapse, Du Bois writes, cost freedmen not only "all the hard-earned dollars" they had saved but something worse — "all the faith in saving," and much of their faith in men generally. He judges its failure a wound the nation "has never yet made good," one that did more to undercut Black economic self-reliance than "ten additional years of slavery."; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard
The Freedmen's Bureau: The federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, created in 1865 under Major-General Oliver O. Howard to manage the transition from slavery to freedom for four million former slaves. Du Bois credits it with distributing relief, founding the first Southern free schools, and securing freedmen's recognition before courts of law, while faulting it for failing to secure Black landownership and for uneven, sometimes corrupt, local agents. He calls its dissolution a "legacy of striving for other men" — the unfinished work whose failure, he argues, set the terms of the twentieth-century color-line.; Related: General Oliver O. Howard, The Freedmen's Bank, Forty Acres and a Mule, The Revolution of 1876
The Jim Crow Car: The legally segregated railway car Du Bois is required to ride whenever he travels through the South, described bluntly in "Of the Black Belt": "If you wish to ride with me you must come into the 'Jim Crow Car.'" He notes the discomfort is not in the car's condition, which he finds "fairly clean and comfortable," but "in the hearts" of the Black passengers forced into it — a small, recurring, physical enactment of the color-line that Du Bois returns to more than once in the book.; Related: The Color-Line, Of the Sons of Master and Man
The Negro Church: The institution Du Bois calls "the social centre of Negro life in the United States," functioning simultaneously as house of worship, club, employment bureau, and site of nearly every organized Black activity in a segregated town. He traces its roots from the plantation Preacher and the West African priest-and-medicine-man tradition through the slave-era mingling of Christianity and older belief he calls "Voodooism," to the independent Black Baptist and Methodist denominations that emerged after Emancipation. Du Bois treats it as the register of the "inner ethical life" of Black America, torn in his own day between a Southern current of resigned accommodation and a Northern current of bitter radicalism.; Related: The Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy, The Sorrow Songs
The Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy: Du Bois's name for the three elements he identifies as the inherited core of Black religious life under slavery, first witnessed by him at a rural Southern revival. The Preacher he calls "the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil"; the Music, "that plaintive rhythmic melody" later heard again in the Sorrow Songs; and the Frenzy, the ecstatic physical "Shouting" that seized worshippers when, in the belief of the congregation, "the Spirit of the Lord passed by." Du Bois traces all three back through the plantation Preacher, who descended from the African priest and medicine-man, to argue that the Black church is the oldest surviving Black institution in America.; Related: The Negro Church, The Sorrow Songs
The Revolution of 1876: Du Bois's term for the contested election of 1876 and the collapse of federal commitment to Reconstruction that followed it. He first names it in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," writing that "the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired," and returns to it in his account of Booker T. Washington's rise, tracing to its aftermath "the disfranchisement of the Negro," the "legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority," and the "steady withdrawal of aid" from Black higher education. For Du Bois it marks the political turn that made the color-line's twentieth-century shape possible.; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, Disenfranchisement, The Washington–Du Bois Debate
The Sorrow Songs: Du Bois's name for the Negro spirituals, which he calls "the sole American music" and "the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas." Every chapter of the book opens with an unattributed bar of one of these songs, and the closing chapter traces ten "master songs" — among them "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen," "Swing low, sweet chariot," and "Steal away" — back to their origins in bondage. Du Bois reads them as historical evidence as much as art: testimony of "trouble and exile, of strife and hiding," and of a faith the nation has not yet earned.; Related: Fisk Jubilee Singers, Fisk University, The Veil
The Talented Tenth: Du Bois's argument, developed in "Of the Training of Black Men," that Black colleges must train an educated leadership class rather than confine Black Americans to industrial training alone. He points to the roughly two thousand Black college graduates already at work as teachers, clergy, and physicians and asks pointedly, "by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?" The phrase names Du Bois's conviction that a trained minority of "exceptional men" must lead the uplift of the many, a claim he sets directly against Booker T. Washington's industrial-education program.; Related: Booker T. Washington, The Washington–Du Bois Debate, Industrial Education, Atlanta University
The Two Johns: The two men named John at the center of "Of the Coming of John" — John Jones, Black, who leaves the small Georgia town of Altamaha to study at Wells Institute up North, and the white John of the town's judge, sent to Princeton. Both townspeople await "when John comes," but education awakens the Black John to the Veil he had not felt as a boy, while it hardens the white John's easy assumption of racial privilege; the story ends in violence when the two men's paths finally cross again in Altamaha. Du Bois uses the parallel structure — same name, same town, opposite outcomes — to dramatize how identical educations produce opposite reckonings with the color-line.; Related: The Veil, The Color-Line, The Talented Tenth
The Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death: The two trials Du Bois assigns to Alexander Crummell's life story — the Valley of Humiliation, the daily grinding indignity of being refused ordination and standing on unequal terms before men who held his future in their hands, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the long, isolating "world-wandering of a soul in search of itself" that followed his refusal to accept second-class ordination. Du Bois writes that he does not know "which be darker," but credits Crummell with crossing both and returning "humble and strong." The image gives Du Bois a vocabulary for describing spiritual survival under sustained racial injury without sentimentalizing or minimizing it.; Related: Alexander Crummell, The Veil
The Veil: The recurring image Du Bois uses for the invisible but absolute barrier separating Black Americans from the world of white America — a veil he traces to his own boyhood in New England, when a schoolmate's refusal of his visiting-card first revealed to him that he was "shut out from their world." To live "within the Veil" is to inhabit a separate world of striving, sorrow, and second sight, seeing the white world dimly and being seen by it only as a problem. The Veil recurs throughout the book as the organizing figure for the color-line's daily, intimate effects, from a child's schoolroom to a father's grief.; Related: Double-Consciousness, The Color-Line, Burghardt Du Bois
The Washington–Du Bois Debate: Du Bois's respectful but pointed dissent, laid out in "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," from the program of accommodation Washington had made national policy. Where Washington asked Black Americans to set aside political power, civil rights, and higher education in favor of industrial training and wealth-building, Du Bois and men like the Grimkes and Kelly Miller insisted on "the right to vote," "civic equality," and "the education of youth according to ability." Du Bois frames the disagreement not as personal rivalry but as a duty: honest criticism among leaders, he writes, is "the soul of democracy," and silence in the face of a mistaken program would betray both the race and the nation.; Related: The Atlanta Compromise, Booker T. Washington, The Talented Tenth, Frederick Douglass
The Wings of Atalanta: Du Bois's extended metaphor, drawn from the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes' golden apples, for the danger that Atlanta — and the New South, and the rising Black middle class alike — will be tempted by wealth into abandoning "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness" as its true goal. Just as Atalanta lost the sacred race by pausing for golden fruit, Du Bois warns that a "Mammonism" measuring all success in dollars threatens to replace the Black church and Black school as the community's guiding ideal. He argues that only universities like Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard — the "Wings of Atalanta" — can carry the pursuit of prosperity past that temptation without corrupting it.; Related: Atlanta University, The Talented Tenth
Tuskegee Institute: The industrial and normal school in Alabama founded and led by Booker T. Washington, built on the principle that Black economic advancement through manual training and land-ownership should come before, or instead of, the pursuit of political rights and liberal education. Du Bois credits Tuskegee's real accomplishments while pointing out its dependence on college-trained teachers as evidence against Washington's own argument that higher education was a lesser priority — noting elsewhere that "the backbone of Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and Atlanta." For Du Bois, Tuskegee is both an achievement worth respecting and the institutional embodiment of the program he contests.; Related: Booker T. Washington, The Atlanta Compromise, The Talented Tenth

W

W. E. B. Du Bois (Narrator): Du Bois writes The Souls of Black Folk in his own voice throughout, identifying himself in the Forethought as one who is "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil." He appears directly as narrator and participant across the book — as a young schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, as a traveler through the Georgia Black Belt, as a professor at Atlanta University, and as a grieving father in "Of the Passing of the First-Born" — making his own biography part of the book's evidence rather than a frame around it. This first-person presence is central to the book's method: Du Bois argues from inside the Veil, not about it from outside.; Related: The Veil, Burghardt Du Bois, Josie