- Du Bois explores the “colour line” as the central problem of the 20th century.
- He Introduced the concept of “double-consciousness” – the internal conflict of black identity in a white-dominated society.
- Reflects on a childhood experience of racism and being “shut out by a vast veil.”
- He analyzed the role of The Freedmen’s Bureau’s aim to help freed slaves. He argued it fell short of true justice.
- He argued Segregation laws (e.g. Plessy v. Ferguson) reinforced white supremacy post-Civil War.
- Du Bois later saw racism as a global issue, reshaping his views after visiting the Warsaw Ghetto.
- His work inspired the civil rights movement and Pan-Africanism.
In the 19th century’s later years, Frederick Douglass was a US social reformer and a freed slave. He highlighted the persistent divide in the USA. He argued that although blacks had ceased to belong to individuals, they had nevertheless become slaves of society. Out of the depths of slavery, he said, “has come this prejudice and this colour line.” It was stitched into white dominion in the workplace, the ballot box, the legal courts, and everyday life.
The Souls of Black Folk
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois investigated the idea of the colour line in The Souls of Black Folk.
This book is a literary, sociological, and political landmark. It examines the changing position of African-Americans from the US Civil War and its aftermath to the early 1900s. This is analyzed in terms of the physical positions of black and white political life in the South. It also considers their economic and moral positions. It concludes that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line. This refers to the continuing division between the opportunities and perspectives of blacks and whites.
Du Bois begins his study by pointing out something important. No white person is willing to talk about race with blacks. They choose instead to act out prejudice in various ways. But what they really want to know is “How does it feel to be a problem?” he asks.
Du Bois finds the question unanswerable. A problem makes sense from a white perspective. A black people see themselves as “a problem.” He then examines how a double set of perspectives has occurred. He provides the example of his first encounter with racism. While at primary school, a new pupil refused to accept a greeting card from Du Bois. This was the moment when it dawned on him that he was different from the others.
He felt like them in his heart, he says. But he realized that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Initially, he was undaunted. He says that he felt no need to tear down the veil at first. Then he grew up and saw that all the most dazzling opportunities in the world were for white people. They were not for black people. There was a colour line, and he was standing on the side that was denied power, opportunity, dignity, and respect.
Identity crisis
Du Bois suggests that the colour line is internal too. Black people, according to him, see themselves in two ways simultaneously:
Two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.
The unfolding history of the black person in the USA is the history of this inner conflict. Du Bois claims this inner conflict is a result of the external, worldly battle between black and white people.
He suggests that a black person wants to merge the double-consciousness into one state. They seek to find a true African-American spirit. This spirit “does not Africanize America, nor bleach his African soul in a flood of white Americanism.”
The reflection of the white world views them with amused contempt and pity. Their own sense of self is more fluid and less well-defined. These factors combine to form what Du Bois calls a double-consciousness.
Double-consciousness
Double-consciousness is Du Bois’ term for the peculiar problem of “two-ness” faced by African-Americans. They must develop a sense of self. At the same time, they need to be aware of how they are seen through the eyes of others.
A young black man may be a doctor (above and right). However, he will also be acutely conscious of white society’s stereotyping of black males. They are often seen as dangerous and threatening. They are also stereotyped as, for example, criminals or ghetto gangstas (far right).
The Freedmen’s Bureau
How had black people become the “problem”? Du Bois attempts to explain this issue. He looks to the history of slavery in the USA. He also examines the turning point of the Civil War.
According to him, slavery was the real cause of the war, which started in 1861. As the Union army of the northern states marched into the South, slaves fled to join it. At first, slaves were returned to their owners, but the policy changed and they were kept as military labour.
In 1863, slaves were declared free. The government set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau issued food and clothing to the “flood” of destitute fugitive former slaves. They provided for men, women, and children. Abandoned properties were also distributed. However, the Bureau was run by military staff ill-equipped to deal with social reorganization. The Bureau faced challenges due to the task’s enormous scale. The promise of handing over slave-driven plantations to former slaves vanished. This happened when it became clear that over 800,000 acres were affected.
One of the great successes of the Bureau was the provision of free schools for all children in the South.
Du Bois points out that this was seen as a problem. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. Opposition to black education in the South showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood.
At the same time, the Bureau slowed down in legal matters. According to Du Bois, it used its powers for other purposes. It did not help the weak. Instead, it allowed the strong to tyrannize the feeble. It let the nation return to normal industrial methods – the methods of 1840. In doing this, it broke the new ground of human freedom.” In other words, the Bureau reinforced the old slave system under a new name.
Du Bois says that the Bureau was, on the whole, a success. “It was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted.” But the Bureau was run by military men. They were not trained for the task. It was a loss in funding, and that was a loss….that a nation which today menaces the world as a “model” of democracy has not yet made good”.
The Bureau had set up a system for reviewing cases under ex-slave proprietorship. It secured the recognition of black people in courts of law. It also founded common schools. However, the freedmen felt the Bureau was too soft. It did not establish justice for the ex-slaves. In fact, it increased the feeling of injustice. The Bureau was impartial instead of being explicitly set up to operate in more positive terms.
Compromise or agitation?
Following the post-war period of reform was the Reconstruction era. But some of the newly won black rights started to slip away. A ruling of the US legal case (Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896) made segregation in public places permissible. It set the pattern of racial segregation in the South. This lasted until Brown vs Board of Education, 1954. Modern military loss led to a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. They spread a nativist white supremacist message. This period also saw a rise in racist violence, including lynchings.
In 1895 the African-American politician Booker T Washington had given a speech now known as “the Atlanta Compromise”. He suggested that black people should be patient. They should adopt white middle-class standards and seek self-advancement by self-improvement. Education was also recommended to show their worth. Washington argued that social change would be more likely in the longer term. He believed this could be achieved by foregoing political rights in return for economic rights and legal justice. This accommodationist view became the dominant ideology of the time.
Du Bois disagreed strongly, and in The Souls of Black Folk he explained why. He did not expect full civil rights immediately. However, he was certain that people do not gain their rights by wronging them away voluntarily. Du Bois had hoped that social science could eliminate racism and segregation. He believed that only political agitation was an effective strategy.
Stretching the colour line
In 1949, Du Bois visited the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. Two-thirds of the population had been killed during the Nazi occupation. Additionally, 85 per cent of the city lay in ruins. He was shocked by the experience, which he said gave him a “more complete understanding of the Negro problem”. Faced with such absolute devastation and destruction, Du Bois reassessed his analysis of the colour line. He knew it was a direct consequence of racist stereotyping and violence. He declared it a phenomenon that can occur to any cultural or ethnic group.
In his 1952 essay for the magazine Jewish Life, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”, he writes: “The race problem… cuts across lines of color. It also crosses lines of physique.” It transcends belief and status. It was a matter of… human hate and prejudice.” It is therefore not so much about who is on each side of the “line.” The line can be drawn to articulate difference and hatred in any group or society.
Activist and scholar
Du Bois was a founder member of the civil rights organization. This organization is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His ideas were concerned with people of African descent everywhere. During the 1920s, he helped found the Pan-African Association in Paris, France. He also organized a series of pan-African congresses around the world. However, at the time of writing The African soul in the early 1900s, he noted some limitations. He said that the conditions were not yet in place to achieve a true and unified African-American spirit.
Du Bois applied systematic methods of fieldwork to previously neglected areas of study. The use of empirical data to catalogue the effects of racism on lives enabled him to collect widely held assumptions. For example, he produced a wealth of data on the effects of urban life on African-Americans in Philadelphia. He wrote in detail about the ill health, low income, poor housing, and lack of education suffered by black people. In his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he suggested that the difficulties facing black communities are not innate. Crime is a product of the environment. His pioneering sociological research and thinking hugely influenced later prominent civil rights leaders. This included Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Du Bois is recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century.
W E B Du Bois: biography
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, philosopher, and political leader. He was born in Massachusetts, USA, three years after the end of the Civil War.
After graduating from high school, Du Bois studied at Fisk University in Nashville. He also studied at the University of Berlin, Germany, where he met Max Weber. In 1895, he became the first African American to receive a PhD. He gained a doctorate in history at Harvard University. From 1897 to 1910, he was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University. From 1934 to 1944, he was chairman of the department of sociology.
In 1961 Du Bois moved to Ghana, Africa, to work on the Encyclopaedia Africana, but died there two years later. He wrote numerous books, articles, and essays, and founded and edited four journals.
Key works
- 1903 The Souls of Black Folks
- 1920 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
- 1939 Black Folk, Then and Now
Signposting
This material is extension work for Race and Ethnicity, a theme which runs all the way through A-level sociology