A 1903 collection of fourteen essays, each headed by a bar of a sorrow song, which announced that the century's problem would be the colour line (1903)
The Souls of Black Folk — the source of 'double consciousness' and 'the veil'.
Philosophy
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868–1963 · American (later Ghanaian)
Pragmatism and social theory; Pan-Africanism; the sociology of race
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, philosopher and activist, and the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. His 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk gave the twentieth century two of its governing ideas — the colour line and double consciousness — while The Philadelphia Negro invented empirical urban sociology in the United States. He co-founded the NAACP, edited The Crisis for a quarter of a century, organised the Pan-African Congresses, and died a citizen of Ghana on the eve of the March on Washington.
How to spot them
- ▸'The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line'
- ▸Double consciousness and the veil; the Talented Tenth
- ▸First African American to take a Harvard PhD (1895); the Niagara Movement; co-founder of the NAACP; editor of The Crisis
- ▸His long argument with Booker T. Washington over the Atlanta Compromise
- ▸Left the United States for Ghana, joined the Communist Party at 93, and died in Accra in August 1963
Key works
An 1899 door-to-door survey of a city's Seventh Ward, generally called the first great empirical study in American sociology (1899)
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.
A 1935 revisionist history arguing that enslaved people won their own freedom by withdrawing their labour, and that the post-war southern governments were not the catastrophe historians had claimed (1935)
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 — it overturned the Dunning School and its 'general strike' thesis is still debated.
His 1895 Harvard doctoral dissertation on the suppression of a transatlantic traffic, published as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies (1896)
The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870.
A set of hand-drawn spiral charts, maps and coloured grids sent to the 1900 Paris Exposition, now admired as pioneering data visualisation (1900)
The data portraits made for the 'Exhibit of American Negroes' at the Exposition Universelle.
A 1940 memoir presented not as one man's life story but as the autobiography of a race concept (1940)
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept.
Key ideas
- Double consciousness: 'this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others' — a twoness of being both American and Black
- The veil: the screen that separates the races, through which the excluded can see the dominant world but not enter it
- The colour line: the organising division of modern global politics, not merely an American problem
- The Talented Tenth: an educated minority who would lead — a position he came to doubt and largely repudiated late in life
- Second sight: exclusion grants the excluded a knowledge of the society that its beneficiaries lack
- Pan-Africanism: the political unity of African and African-descended peoples across the colonial world
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868; studied at Fisk, Harvard and the University of Berlin
- •In 1895 he became the first African American to be awarded a PhD by Harvard
- •Taught at Atlanta University, where he ran the pioneering Atlanta Sociological Laboratory studies
- •His chapter 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others' launched his long public dispute with Washington over accommodation and industrial education
- •Founded the Niagara Movement in 1905 and helped found the NAACP in 1909, editing its magazine The Crisis from 1910 to 1934
- •Organised a series of Pan-African Congresses from 1919, culminating in the fifth at Manchester in 1945
- •Had his passport confiscated in the 1950s after being indicted, and acquitted, as an unregistered foreign agent
- •Joined the Communist Party of the USA in 1961, moved to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah and took Ghanaian citizenship
- •Died in Accra on 27 August 1963, the day before the March on Washington, where the news was announced to the crowd
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — W.E.B. Du Bois
- W. E. B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk