W.E.B. Du Bois

Vann R. Newkirk II

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” This infamous formulation is the central idea around which W. E. B. Du Bois crafted what would become the most influential work about race in America: The Souls of Black Folk. Since he penned these words in 1903, the fraught relationship between the races has dominated the country’s policies, economy, and social developments. Published forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois’s radioactive essays addressed an American nation that had still not yet found “peace from its sins.” Today, amid furor over voting rights, mass incarceration, police brutality and extrajudicial killing, the ghosts of white supremacy and ethnonationalism, and the apparent fragility of the equality and desegregation gains of the Civil Rights Movement, Du Bois’s work has proven prophetic, and more urgently necessary than ever. Striking in their psychological precision and political foresight, the fourteen chapters of The Souls of Black Folk move between historical and sociological essays, song and poetry, personal recollection and fiction, laying out the foundational ideas of “double-consciousness”—an inner conflict created by the seemingly irreconcilable “black” and “American” identities—and “the veil,” through which African-Americans must see a spectrum of economic, social, and political opportunities entirely differently from their white counterparts. For anyone interested in understanding race in America, or in the literary lineage that Du Bois generated—from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, to Toni Morrison’s Sula, to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me—The Souls of Black Folk is essential reading.

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