oxford world’ s classics THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on 23 February 1868. In 1885 he went to Fisk University where he edited the Fisk Herald. After graduating in June 1888 he continued his studies at Harvard College, gaining an MA degree in history in 1891. Following further study at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he returned to the United States in 1894 to take a teaching position in classics at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. Du Bois became the first black to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 and moved to Philadelphia the next year to pursue a socio- logical study of black life there. After accepting a faculty position in economics and history at Atlanta University, he gained renown as an intellectual in the next decade with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his participation in the Niagara Movement, a group of black leaders assembled in 1905 to promote full civil and economic rights for blacks. In 1910 Du Bois moved to New York, where he accepted a position at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as the editor of the civil rights organization’s monthly journal, The Crisis. In February 1919 in Paris, Du Bois organized the First Pan-African Congress, which gathered delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. He continued to publish a steady stream of important books, including Darkwater (1920), Dark Princess (1928), and Black Reconstruction (1935). After a series of political conflicts, Du Bois resigned from The Crisis in 1934 and returned to Atlanta University, where he founded and edited another journal, Phylon. Increasingly radical in his public criticism of US foreign policy and race relations after the Second World War, Du Bois worked with pacifist organ- izations and the Council on African Affairs. After celebrating his ninetieth birthday in New York, Du Bois toured Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in 1958 and 1959. In 1961 he accepted the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of independent Ghana, to move to Africa. Du Bois died in Ghana on 27 August 1963, on the eve of the monumental civil rights protest march in Washington, DC. Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor in the Depart- ment of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the co-editor of the essay collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and the editor of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (2004) and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (2005). oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles––from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS W. E. B. DU BOIS The Souls of Black Folk Edited with an Introduction and Notes by BRENT HAYES EDWARDS 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial material © Brent Hayes Edwards 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963. The souls of Black folk / W. E. B. Du Bois ; edited with an introduction and notes by Brent Hayes Edwards. p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics paperback) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–19–280678–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African Americans. I. Edwards, Brent Hayes. II. Title. E185.6.D797 2007 973′.0496073––dc22 ISBN 978–0–19–280678–9 13579108642 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc. CONTENTS Introduction vii Note on the Text xxiv Select Bibliography xxviii A Chronology of W. E. B. Du Bois xxx THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK 1 Appendix I: The Conservation of Races 179 Appendix II: The Talented Tenth 189 Appendix III: ‘Self-Review’ and ‘Fifty Years After’ 206 Explanatory Notes 209 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Since its publication in April 1903, The Souls of Black Folk has justifiably been celebrated as the definitive text of the African American literary tradition. A seemingly modest collection of four- teen pieces framed by a preface and afterword, the book made an immediate impact on American political debate, erupting with the sudden brilliance of ‘fireworks going off in a cemetery’.1 It launched its author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an ambitious 35-year-old African American professor of sociology at Atlanta University, into international prominence as an authoritative voice on what was then termed the ‘Negro problem’. With its unusual polyphony of genres––autobiography, history, political criticism, sociology, ethnography, biography, eulogy, fiction––the book has had a formative influence on the entire tradition of African American writing that has followed in its wake. As literary critic Arnold Ram- persad has written: ‘If all of a nation’s literature may stem from one book, as Hemingway implied about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then it can as accurately be said that all of Afro-American literature of a creative nature has proceeded from Du Bois’s com- prehensive statement on the nature of the people in The Souls of Black Folk.’2 One finds its formal strategies and rhetorical daring echoed in novels from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and beyond. Yet Du Bois’s work has been equally central to African American non-fiction and scholarship on race, history, and politics. Ten years after its publication, the black intellectual William H. Ferris called The Souls of Black Folk ‘the political Bible of the negro race’.3 It is one of the very rare books that marks the threshold of its historical era (the ‘dawning of the Twentieth Century’, to use Du Bois’s phrase), both 1 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 277. 2 Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 89. 3 William H. Ferris, The African Abroad; or, His Evolution in Western Civilization, vol. i (New Haven: Tuttle, Morhouse, and Taylor, 1913), 276. viii Introduction by articulating the political demands, cultural accomplishments, and ‘spiritual strivings’ of an entire people, and at the same time by setting the definitive terms of debate for a national dialogue about the significance of race in the lingering aftermath of the slave trade. William H. Ferris wrote that Du Bois was one of those uncom- mon men who achieved prominence as an intellectual and political leader by ‘impressing his personality upon men by means of a book’.4 Certainly, from the opening ‘Forethought’, in which Du Bois masterfully ushers his reader into the first chapter with a powerful allusion to the Book of Genesis (‘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?’, p. 4), The Souls of Black Folk is animated and assembled by the force of his singular perspective. Du Bois himself notes that there is a ‘unity of purpose in the distinctively subjective note’ of ‘self-revelation’ in each of the pieces in the book.5 Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to describe the book as simply or predominantly autobiographical in orientation. Throughout its pages, the book enacts a subtle and shifting calibration of pronouns, alternating among a variety of stances including individual testimony (‘between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question’, p.