Starvard.Starvard.
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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the great minds of his century, writes about what it meant to be Black in America just decades after slavery: history, argument, and heartbreak in one voice. His idea of seeing yourself through two sets of eyes at once still shapes how people talk about identity today. Each chapter opens with a line of music, like a door.
Du Bois writes essays that move between history, travel, argument, and grief. He recalls teaching summer school in rural Tennessee, riding the Jim Crow car, and burying his infant son. Each chapter opens with lines of printed music, spirituals he calls sorrow songs, set next to bars of European poetry, so the book's two worlds sit side by side before a word is read.
The great idea is double consciousness: the feeling of always seeing yourself through the eyes of a country that doubts you, of being both American and Black with the two pulls never quite reconciled. He calls the barrier the Veil, and the color line the problem of the new century. Insight, for him, is something a people can be forced to grow.
It still shapes conversations about identity because Du Bois turned personal experience into instruments other people could think with. Watch the shifts of voice: scholar, storyteller, mourner, prophet, sometimes inside a single page.
W. E. B. Du Bois set out to show the world the souls of Black folk: their striving, their music, their double consciousness of being both American and African. Published in 1903, these essays and sketches changed American thought, and their sentences still ring like bells.
The first chapter
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 today. 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?
W. E. B. Du B.
Atlanta, GA, Feb. 1, 1903.
To
Burghardt and Yolande
the Lost and the Found
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1903. Author died 1963. Public domain in the US. Share this book: WhatsApp