The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."
A collection of fourteen essays blending sociology, history, and memoir. Du Bois introduced "double consciousness," the sense of seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous white world, and "the veil" dividing Black and white America. It established Black inner life as a subject of serious scholarship, and its challenge to Booker T. Washington's accommodation shaped arguments over Black advancement for decades.
Its legacy. Foundational to African American letters and the sociology of race.
- Author
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- First published
- 1903
- Genre
- Essays
- Theme
- Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
More from Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
- The Black Jacobins — C.L.R. James
The Haitian Revolution told as the only slave revolt to build a nation.
- The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality — Cheikh Anta Diop
A claim that the pharaohs were Black, and that Greece borrowed from Africa.
- The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness — Paul Gilroy
Black identity as a ship in motion, not a flag over one homeland.
- Pan-Africanism or Communism — George Padmore
Two roads out of empire, and a case for the African one.