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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Black/Red View
'THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK' 100 years on
by John Alan W. E. B. Du Bois' THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK was published
on April 18, 1903, a hundred years ago. It was republished throughout the 20th
century, probably because, as Du Bois predicted, the color line was the problem
of the 20th century. According to David Levering Lewis' biography of Du Bois,
the first edition was an "electrifying manifesto mobilizing a people for
bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history. Ironically, even its
author was among the tens of thousands whose conceptions of themselves were to
be forever altered by the book." DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND FREEDOM Du Bois' thesis is that African Americans live in
"a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see
himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
this dual consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the
eyes of the other, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness--an American and 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." Du Bois says African Americans want to end their twoness
and "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 bleach his 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." When Du Bois wrote that African Americans want "to
end their 'twoness'" and be free, he grasped the dialectical method of
African-American freedom struggle. It was the greatest point of his life. The
desire to overcome their "twoness" characterized every struggle since
that time and makes Du Bois a contemporary. The contradiction in consciousness
demands action and leads to developments in the world and self-development. This
is the essence of what has energized the Civil Rights Movement and every
movement for freedom in this country. RACIST 'REALITY' VS. HUMAN UNITY Du Bois wrote THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK when most African
Americans were living in the un-reconstructed South and being terrorized by
lynch mobs. During this time, Booker T. Washington was presenting a
well-financed campaign to convince African Americans to accept segregated
conditions and only engage in economic self-help activities. Du Bois' position
was a challenge to that. It opposed Washington's accommodation to reality and
sought to create a new reality of a whole re-united human being. There were
others opposed to Washington, but it was the absoluteness of Du Bois' position,
the desire to create a whole person, that crystallized that opposition. Du Bois was a brilliant, well-educated man. He is widely
known for having a concept that only such exceptional men could lead and think
for African American masses. He called these men "the Talented Tenth."
When he turned to socialism, this concept went from being centered in the
Talented Tenth of African Americans to the elitist party of Stalin. This elitism prohibited him from working out an active
relation of his theory of a struggle for oneness to the concrete events that
shaped history. This would have required a dialectical theory not just of
consciousness, but of freedom. Such a dialectical perspective was not
forthcoming from Du Bois even when it was most needed. For example, he did not
relate his theory of the struggle for self-conscious oneness to the Civil Rights
Movement as it emerged. DU BOIS' GREATNESS...AND LIMITATIONS He wrote in 1957 "...the black workers, the
scrubbers and cleaners, the porters and seamstresses. They turned to a struggle
not for great principles and noble truths, but just asked to be let alone after
a tiring day's work; to be free of petty insult after hard and humble toil.
These folk, led by a man who had read Hegel, knew of Karl Marx, and had followed
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, preached: 'Not by Might, nor by Power, but by My
Spirit,' saith the Lord. Did this doctrine and practice of non-violence bring
solution of the race problem in Alabama? It did not." |
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