The Nexus Archive
Civil Rights Thought · Essay
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois · The Prophet of the Color Line · Reconstruction and Jim Crow, 1868-1963
Du Bois's classic work on race, double consciousness, education, and the color line.
- Advanced
- 1903
- ~5 hr 15 min read
- 30 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the The Forethought guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
The Music Before the Argument
W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, writing from Atlanta as a historian and sociologist who had also taught in a rural Tennessee school. Emancipation lay forty years behind him. Segregation, disfranchisement and racial violence made the distance between legal freedom and a life securely lived an urgent question. He asks what Black Americans need to develop their capacities, and what the country loses by refusing them equal standing.
The book's best-known image is the Veil: a barrier that separates Black and white America, distorts what each can see, and forces Black Americans into the “double-consciousness” of knowing themselves while also seeing the contemptuous image imposed upon them. Du Bois follows that pressure through freedom, schools, labor, land, political power, religion, grief and art. His evidence can be statistical or intimate; his scale can shift from a federal institution to one child.
His disagreement with Booker T. Washington concerns the rights and education that economic advancement requires, as well as who may speak for a people. It sits within a larger inquiry conducted through history, field observation, memory and fiction. Literary epigraphs and bars of Sorrow Songs stand at the openings of the numbered chapters. These inherited voices accompany the argument: lives obscured by the color line can speak through music and story as well as through an official record.
The opening pages
The Forethought: Du Bois Addresses the Reader
The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the white world, 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. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World’s Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, 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?
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A witness path through freedom, dignity, law, and the unfinished demand for equality.
Chapter guides · 30
The Forethought
A Book Spoken from Within the Veil
Du Bois introduces the forms through which he will describe a spiritual world.
A sequence with a purpose
The Forethought joins a national claim about the color line to a personal position: Du Bois speaks as someone living within the Veil. He announces history, education, rural life and religion alongside memories, a life story, a tale and song. These forms approach different parts of a world that outsiders rarely know; a single kind of account would leave much of it unheard.
Words and music at the threshold
Du Bois identifies earlier essays that he has altered for the book and explains the bars of Sorrow Songs placed before its chapters. The music brings another inherited voice into the account. His appeal for charity and careful attention acknowledges the difficulty of making this world intelligible across the separation he names.
I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings: The Veil Named
The Veil Is Named
A childhood refusal opens into the divided demands of Black American life.
A self seen through hostile eyes
The girl who refuses Du Bois’s visiting card makes him conscious of a separation that effort and achievement cannot simply erase. Double-consciousness describes the strain of being Black and American while seeing oneself through a society’s contempt. His wish is to preserve both identities in a fuller self, rather than surrender either one. The divided aims of worker, minister, scholar and artist show the strain extending beyond childhood.
Freedom, the vote and learning together
Du Bois follows successive hopes placed in emancipation, voting and education. Each offers something necessary; none has yet secured the whole life promised. His conclusion gathers useful work, higher culture, political power and freedom together. The songs and traditions he names are contributions Black Americans bring to the republic, even as the republic obstructs their development.
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom, Part 1
Freedom Creates a National Obligation
War forces the Union to decide what emancipation requires beyond release from slavery.
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom, Part 2
The Bureau Attempts the Material Work of Freedom
Relief, labor, land, schools and courts reveal an agency’s mixed powers and record.
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom, Part 3
Reconstruction Ends Before Its Work Does
Du Bois separates the Bureau’s achievements from its failures and the disaster of the Freedmen’s Bank.
III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, Part 1
Washington Becomes the Accepted Spokesman
Du Bois explains Washington’s extraordinary authority and the difficulty of criticizing it.
III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, Part 2
Conciliation Cannot Purchase Citizenship
Three concessions expose the limits of a program centered on economic advancement.
IV. Of the Meaning of Progress, Part 1
Progress Enters a One-Room School
Du Bois recalls two summers teaching in a Tennessee community.
IV. Of the Meaning of Progress, Part 2
The Return Complicates Every Measure
Ten years bring changed homes and a new school beside debt, violence and Josie’s death.
V. Of the Wings of Atalanta, Part 1
Atlanta Races After the Golden Apples
The New South’s commercial energy becomes a classical temptation.
V. Of the Wings of Atalanta, Part 2
A University Must Form the Ends of Work
Atlanta University becomes Du Bois’s answer to prosperity without a humane purpose.
VI. Of the Training of Black Men, Part 1
Education Must Reconcile Three Histories
World ambition, Southern caste and Black aspirations meet in the struggle over schools.
VI. Of the Training of Black Men, Part 2
The College Is Judged by Its Graduates
Du Bois answers the charge of useless imitation with an inquiry into education and service.
VII. Of the Black Belt, Part 1
The Argument Takes the Train South
Dougherty County enters the book through travel, conversation and particular farms.
VII. Of the Black Belt, Part 2
The Cotton Kingdom Was Built on a Groan
Ruined estates stand beside churches, communal support and memories of coerced labor.
VII. Of the Black Belt, Part 3
Formal Freedom, Unequal Conditions
Farmers, tenants and coerced workers reveal sharply different lives after slavery.
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Part 1
The Golden Fleece Begins at Home
A county inquiry examines crowded cabins, families and continuous labor.
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Part 2
Cotton Converts Work into Debt
Credit and legal power explain why a fertile county cannot readily diversify.
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Part 3
The Economic Ladder Has Missing Rungs
Different labor arrangements offer different degrees of control, with ownership still insecure.
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man, Part 1
Contact Without Community
Neighborhoods and work bring Black and white people together through unequal relations.
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man, Part 2
Disfranchisement Reaches Beyond Elections
Voting, justice and public schools determine whose interests receive protection.
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man, Part 3
Two Worlds Share Space but Not Understanding
Intellectual and social separation persist despite daily contact and acts of charity.
X. Of the Faith of the Fathers, Part 1
The Church Carries a People’s Public Life
A revival opens into a history of worship, organization and moral authority.
X. Of the Faith of the Fathers, Part 2
Faith Divides Between Compromise and Protest
Du Bois describes the ethical strain of aspiration within a society that denies equal standing.
XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born: Grief Within the Veil
The Veil Enters the Nursery
Du Bois mourns a child whose brief life held love and a future already shadowed by race.
XII. Of Alexander Crummell
A Calling Survives Hate, Despair and Doubt
Du Bois honors Alexander Crummell through a life shaped by exclusion and persistent service.
XIII. Of the Coming of John, Part 1
Education Opens John and Wounds Him
Du Bois’s tale follows two boyhood companions toward unequal encounters with the wider world.
XIII. Of the Coming of John, Part 2
Altamaha Gives John No Livable Place
The homecoming ends with a closed school, an assault and the approach of a mounted crowd.
XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs
The Music Becomes Historical Witness
The bars throughout the book gather into an account of memory, suffering and national contribution.
The Afterthought
The Book Ends as a Prayer
Du Bois asks that these fragile pages give rise to thought and action.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read The Souls of Black Folk?
- About 5 hr 15 min in total.
- How difficult is The Souls of Black Folk?
- Advanced. A long essay; about 5 hours of reading.
- Which edition is this?
- The original English text, first published in 1903. The text follows The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903).
- Can I read The Souls of Black Folk for free?
- The Souls of Black Folk is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 30 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was a scholar, writer, sociologist, activist, and co-founder of the NAACP. His work shaped modern thinking about race, citizenship, democracy, education, and the psychological burden of racial domination.
“What does it do to the soul to be forced to see yourself through another's contempt?”
Du Bois gives Nexus a bridge between literature, sociology, political thought, and moral witness.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. The Souls of Black Folk is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.