Between Slavery and the Freedom Movement (~1950–1970)

W.E.B. Du Bois (1903; 1990) The Souls of Black Folks. Introduction, John Edgar Wideman. Vintage Books/The Library of America: New York. 227 pages.

A Brief Review:

After the rise of the abolition movement, the Great American Civil War, and the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the attention of the general public of the United States shifted and — with some very important exceptions — the issue of deeply entrenched racial injustice did not become a pressing political and cultural national problem until the Brown v. Board of Education (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1957), the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the student-led Movement for Peace and Justice eventually produced the political/social/cultural changes of the sixties. Today, many high school and college students and numerous adults have at least a passing familiarity with some of the heroes of the Civil War era (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison…) and of the modern Freedom Movement (Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Malcomb X, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael…). [Different readers will, of course, have other choices for the most central actors.] However, except for those whose particular interests or specialized skills make them better informed than the average educated U.S. American, familiarity with principle Afroamerican actors in the period between 1870 and 1940 is usually quite skimpy in the general population and — even among the politically conscious members of all ethnic groups — uneven at best.

The Souls of Black Folks, first published in 1903 by W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps the best book length introduction to the long hiatus between the U.S. Civil War-and-the abolition of chattel slavery and mid/late 20th Century movement to abolish legal segregation in the United States. Written with a rare combination of overall knowledge and personally witnessed details from the author's life, the author also combines his deep passion for justice with an unusually fair and often nuanced description of the partisan interests of the segregationist South, the commercialized North, and the uncourageous Negroes of his day. Du Bois is frequently remembered as the driving force behind the creation of the NAACP, but the merits of this book are well described in John Edgar Wideman's introduction to the Library of America's 1990 reprint.  He begins with "If I could put one and only one book into the hands of students to whom I was teaching post-Civil War America, I would choose with out hesitation The Souls of Black Folks." Later he expands and says "Souls is a beacon" … [which validated my experience asI realized that it wasn't simply my imagination that created the ambivalence and alienation (abbreviating here)] … "as I negotiated the unspoken, unwritten iron rules of racial etiquette with their violent sanctions always simmering just below the surface."  And later "I've read and taught Souls many times. And each time when I close the book, beauty and pain linger."

Wideman's 6 page introduction speaks of itself. I myself was not able to attend the August 1963 March on Washington. I was serving a 10 day sentence in a Baltimore jail for holding a sign in a public park that said "Be gentle, honest and fearless." I did, however, hear the next morning about King's "I have a Dream" speech from a jailhouse guard. And, soon afterwards, I heard that a quietness had spread over the crowd when it was announced that Du Bois had died the night before. And, in time, I understood that Du Bois had been one of those terribly important witnesses to the Power that endures even when lies are promulgated for decades, centuries and even longer.