From the issue dated April 4, 2003
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The Centennial of 'Souls'Anniversary of Du Bois classic prompts book projects and conferencesBy SCOTT McLEMEE One hundred years ago this month, W.E.B. Du Bois, then a 35-year-old professor
The first African-American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University, Du Bois had sophisticated tastes and a rather aristocratic manner. He could judge any concert, play, or museum exhibition by exacting standards, given his travels in Europe as a student. But segregation meant that most cultural life in Atlanta was off-limits to him, and Du Bois's refusal to make any concession to Jim Crow meant that even routine transportation was a problem. The steady diet of insults that went with life in the South following Reconstruction might have given him ulcers. Instead, it drove Du Bois to turn out a stream of articles on black history, culture, and politics for distinguished literary journals such as The Dial and The Atlantic Monthly. He also contributed papers to scholarly journals such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Arranging his best essays into a book, he polished them until they were dazzlingly brilliant. His sentences at times echo the cadences of the King James Bible. He makes subtle references to Greek mythology. Each chapter opens with a passage of classic European literature, paired with a bar of music from black spirituals (which he called "the sorrow songs"). And the whole book is permeated with allusions to German Romanticism -- beginning with the title, with its reference to the nationalistic concept of the Volk. "Every so often, someone gives us a powerful work that changes the way we look at the world," says Dolan Hubbard, chairman of English and language arts at Morgan State University, in Baltimore. "Du Bois did that. The 360 degrees of black life are reflected in his book. He revealed the inner rhythm of black experience in the United States, and he created a language with which to articulate ourselves." Mr. Hubbard is the editor of "The Souls of Black Folk": One Hundred Years Later and a contributor to another collection, W.E.B. Du Bois and Race: Essays Celebrating the Centennial Publication of "The Souls of Black Folk." Recent papers on Du Bois's classic explore its rich layers of imagery and allusion, the historical context shaping his arguments, and the book's influence on such later writers as Jean Toomer and Richard Wright. But for readers in 1903, the literary nuances of Souls were less breathtaking than the writer's boldness in criticizing Booker T. Washington, a man whose authority in African-American life was second to none. Washington championed vocational education for black youths and discouraged the struggle for civil rights. His influence among white politicians and philanthropists gave him tremendous clout over black colleges, newspapers, and political organizations. Many black intellectuals had criticisms of Washington's leadership, but found it prudent to keep quiet. In Souls, Du Bois denounced Washington's accommodationist policies and questioned his legitimacy as a leader. The demand for full equality was not negotiable, Du Bois said, and the role of education was to prepare for citizenship as well as employment. Not long after his book appeared, Du Bois published another essay, "The Talented Tenth," arguing that black colleges must train the best and the brightest to become "leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. ... The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." Sociologically Speaking The literary and historical significance of Souls makes its anniversary a cultural milestone. It proves a handy means of starting discussions on everything from the role of Cicero in Du Bois's thought to the state of hip-hop. Scholars debate how Afrocentric Souls may be, Du Bois's attitude toward black business, and whether or not he was a feminist. But this year also marks the centennial of another Du Bois volume -- The Negro Church, a study published by Atlanta University Press in 1903 and never reprinted. "I couldn't find the book anywhere for a very long time," says Phil Zuckerman, an assistant professor of sociology and religion at Pitzer College. "I tried libraries and used-book dealers, but it had more or less vanished." Mr. Zuckerman finally located the work on microfilm, and has prepared a new scholarly edition. The Negro Church was the eighth of 13 volumes emerging from the Atlanta Conference, an annual gathering of social scientists interested in African-American issues and convened by Du Bois. The conference's work drew praise in scholarly publications and newspapers alike, at least until 1903. Following the publication of his criticisms of Booker T. Washington, however, it proved increasingly difficult to raise funds for the project. "The Negro Church wasn't just the first study of black churches in America," says Mr. Zuckerman. "This was one of the first studies of religion to use the tools of empirical sociology -- ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and survey analysis." Most earlier work on the sociology of religion, says Mr. Zuckerman, was based on trips to the library, rather than into the field. Having studied psychology with William James at Harvard and attended lectures on sociology given by Max Weber at the University of Berlin, Du Bois was familiar with the most advanced research methods of his day. He has a strong claim to have been among the first social scientists (of any color) in the United States. "But if you look at any of the grand surveys of the history of sociology in America, some of them more than a thousand pages long, his name will not be mentioned," says Mr. Zuckerman. That he was a black sociologist working on black issues didn't help. Neither did his departure from academe in 1910 to edit a magazine for the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (His later embrace of Communism made him still more marginal.) "If ever there was a case of someone being erased from the history of the discipline, it would be Du Bois," says Mr. Zuckerman. "Until recently, you almost never heard him described as anything but a political activist or a man of letters." Du Bois's dry sociological prose in The Negro Church contrasts strikingly with the more lyrical and polemical qualities of Souls. That contrast is "a testament to Du Bois's diversity of thought and his dynamism as a scholar," says Mr. Zuckerman. It also raises interesting questions about his attitude toward religion in general and the black church in particular. Brought up in the Calvinist severities of New England Congregationalism, Du Bois drifted into agnosticism during his university days. Even so, biblical language came naturally to him, and Souls includes a moving tribute to Alexander Crumwell, an African-American clergyman. "In a number of places in his work, he writes that [the church] is the one great tradition of black life," says David Levering Lewis, a professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and the author of a two-volume biography of Du Bois. "But he also really does blame the church for much of what he sees as dysfunction in black culture. He has a bone-deep anticlericalism." Mr. Lewis notes that Du Bois's scholarly demeanor in The Negro Church sometimes gives way to denunciations of the "ignorance" and "immorality" of black ministers. "I get the feeling that if he could throw the whole church out the window, he would." Ambivalence about religion was only part of the complexity of vision that readers find in The Souls of Black Folk. Early in the book, Du Bois writes of the "double consciousness" created in black people by life in a racist society. Some scholars have taken the appearance of that passage to be a definitive moment in the history of African-American thought. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of humanities at Harvard, for example, sees double consciousness at the core of "each black text written in a Western language" -- revealing "a double heritage, two-toned ... double-voiced." In his biography of Du Bois, Mr. Lewis suggests that the passage in Souls drew on Hegel's concept of "a complex reciprocity of master and slave in which the identities of both could be fully realized only to the extent that the consciousness of one was mediated through that of the other." (Mr. Lewis says that Du Bois was able to "reformulate [Hegel] more poetically.") Other scholars have noted that William James wrote about "the doubling of the self" in certain painful psychological states, so Du Bois may have turned his mentor's concepts into a tool of social criticism. But not everyone is persuaded of the centrality of "double consciousness." In W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line, Adolph L. Reed Jr., a political-science professor at New School University, shows that many American thinkers at the turn of the 20th century wrote about the experience of fragmented identity in terms remarkably similar to those found in Souls. When white writers employed the image of double consciousness, says Mr. Reed, it carried a whole set of overtones borrowed from notions of evolutionary doctrine current at the time. One dimension of the divided consciousness embodied "nature." It was understood to be both primitive and feminine. The other aspect, reflecting "culture," was civilized and masculine. The tension of modern life (let alone racism) made them difficult to reconcile. It is a provocative interpretation, as is Mr. Reed's claim that "the double-consciousness notion by and large disappeared from Du Bois's writing after 1903." Curb Your Enthusiasm Mr. Reed's suggestion that Souls may reflect some of the more dubious notions of that era stands in contrast to the general spirit of celebration surrounding the book. And Du Bois's stature has only grown in recent years with the publication of Mr. Lewis's massive biography, which has been honored with two Pulitzer Prizes (one per volume). It comes as a surprise, then, to learn that Mr. Lewis has declined most invitations to discuss Souls on its centenary. "I have some unease about this kind of commemorative exuberance," he says. What happens during anniversary celebrations, Mr. Lewis says, is that "the nice stuff" in an author's work "is embraced and underscored, and the dangerous stuff, implicit or explicit, falls by the wayside." This year happens also to be the 50th anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin -- a coincidence that proves rather significant, given that Du Bois promptly wrote a memorial tribute that was as laudatory as any published at the time. It is reprinted in a selection of Du Bois's writings that Mr. Lewis edited a few years ago. After that volume appeared, "I ran into Herbert Aptheker at a conference," Mr. Lewis says. Mr. Aptheker, a historian named by Du Bois as his literary executor, was also a leading member of the American Communist Party, until the early 1990s. Even Mr. Aptheker. who died in March, found Du Bois's adulation of the Soviet dictator a bit embarrassing. "So here's the great Stalinist historian, and he's saying, 'Why did you print that?'" recalls Mr. Lewis. "I said, 'But Herbert, it's part of what made the man so prickly.' He smiled and said, 'Yes, I guess you had to do it.'"
A DU BOIS BOOKSHELF The Souls of Black Folk is available from Dover, Modern Library, Penguin, and W.W. Norton. It is also included in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (Oxford University Press) as well as W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (Library of America). The new edition of Du Bois's The Negro Church, from AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield, contains an introduction by Phil Zuckerman, Sandra Barnes, and Daniel Cady. Other titles of interest include: Stanley Crouch and Playthell Benjamin, Reconsidering "The Souls of Black Folk": Thoughts on the Groundbreaking Classic Work of W.E.B. Du Bois (Running Press, 2003) Chester J. Fontenot Jr. and Mary Alice Morgan, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois and Race: Essays Celebrating the Centennial Publication of "The Souls of Black Folk" (Mercer University Press, 2002) Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993) Dolan Hubbard, ed., "The Souls of Black Folk": One Hundred Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 2003) David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (Henry Holt, 1993 and 2000) Adolph L. Reed Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 1997) Phil Zuckerman, ed., Du Bois on Religion (AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 30, Page A16
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education