With these readings, we turn to a thinker whose work builds on and reacts to many of the earlier readings in this couse, W.E.B. DuBois. As an important early sociologist, he described society in ways that Locke would not have thought of.  Attempting to understand human psychology, this student of William James developed the notion of double consciousness that is still used today. Later in life, he turned to the work of Marx and Engels.

    Celeste Cobham-Portorreal, the Ronald A. McNair Faculty-in-Training Fellow, has developed the introduction that follows, chosen the readings, and written the exercises that appear in Discussion Board. -DPT

    Following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. One advocate for Blacks at this time was W.E.B. Dubois.
W. E. B. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. DuBois was educated at Fisk University, Harvard University (where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1895) and the University of Berlin. DuBois was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University where he conducted a series of sociological studies on the conditions of blacks in the South.

    The year 1896 was a growing period for Mr. DuBois. With his education behind him he earned a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct research in Philadelphia’s slums. The Philadelphia Negro “revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as long historic development and not a transient occurrence. Here is a sample of that work: please glance at it to get a sense of how he approached his topic:

http://journals.about.com/arts/journals/library/weekly/aa020901.htm
 

    Another leader for Blacks during this period of time was Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington’s position on how Blacks could lose their second-class status was very different from that of W.E.B. Dubois. Washington felt that it could only be accomplished through economic means while DuBois took the stance that education was the key. Although at one time both leaders agreed on many issues, by 1903 these two leaders began to clash on how equality should be approached. In 1903 wrote The Souls of Black Folk, taking the position that “the Black men of American have a duty to perform; a duty stern and delicate, to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. In the famous chapter III, titled “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” you can see the difference in philosophy between Washington and DuBois. DuBois believed that only through protest and agitation could the Negro survived.

    In 1906, DuBois went on to found a “radical” civil rights protest organization called The Niagara Movement but lack of funds made it disband by 1910. This movement, however, would be the foundation of what would be later the NAACP. DuBois was the director of the NAACP publications and research and founder-editor of the association’s publication The Crisis. This publication became a forerunner in publicizing injustices against Blacks. The Crisis grew from a readership of approximately 1000 readers in 1909 to 10,000 by 1919.
After visiting Russia in 1927 and becoming exposed to thinkers such as Marx and Engels, DuBois began seeing life in a different way. “He could no longer support integration as a present tactic and relegated it to a long range goal. Unable to trust white politicians, white capitalists or white workers he invested everything in the segregated socialized economy). By 1933 DuBois ended his relationship with the NAACP and returned to Atlanta University where he completed Black Reconstruction and Dusk of Dawn which expounded his concepts and views on both the African’s and African American’s quest for freedom. By 1949 DuBois was a member of the left wing American Labor Party when he wrote Drunk with Power,  arguing that we (the US) are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us, and to a third world war, which will ruin the world.” DuBois left the United States and for the remainder of his life resided in Ghana as an official member of the Communist party.

On August 27,1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, DuBois died in Accra, Ghana, no longer a US citizen, but a citizen of Ghana.
DuBois was a great revolutionary thinker. He is regarded is a pioneering, Pan-Africanist “who was memorialized by the few who understood the genius of the man and neglected by the many who were afraid that his teachings would unite the world into revolution.

Note:  DuBois attack on Washington is quite fierce. Students interested in Washington’s own life and work may want to look at his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in 1901.  In Chapter 14, you’ll find the 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech that offended DuBois. Here is one quotation:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.

A theme in American psychology in the 1890s was the notion that "the mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities," as DuBois' teacher William James phrased it in The Principles of Psychology (N.Y. 1950, originally published in 1890) volume 1, p. 288.  Other thinkers of the period also discussed "split personalities" or similar theories that the mind could contain thoughts that were not harmonious.  DuBois' originality lay in applying the notion of "doubleness" to the way in which African-Americans perceived themselves.  Here are two of the many passages from Souls of Black Folk:

            After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born
          with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
          only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
          sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks
          on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
          unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder  (ch. 1)

                From the double life
          every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet
          struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense
          of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are
          changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of
          the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double
          social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or
          to radicalism.  (ch. 10)

    Required reading:

1)    On the Training of Black Men

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/blacked/dutrain.htm
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=DubTrai&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public

2)  The Souls of Black Folks, chapter 3

(another URL)
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/northamerican/TheSoulsofBlackFolk/toc.html

http://www.bartleby.com/114/
 

    Further Recommended Reading for students interested in DuBois

Strivings of the Negro People

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DubStri.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (you may have to hit REFRESH to get this one to load.  I looked at both sites to evaluate the accuracy of...)

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/black/dubstriv.htm
 

Evolution of Negro Leadership

http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/dubo_a09.htm
 

The Philadelphia Negro (an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1999 that both approves and criticizes DuBois' personality and achievement).

http://www.philly.com/packages/history/people/dubois/DUBO23.asp