Abstract
In a New York Times review of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the critic gave cautious praise to a work that by the end of the twentieth century would be a classic piece of literature that represented the conditions and needs of African Americans then and now. The reviewer, clearly sympathetic to the Southern point of view and the hegemony of Booker T. Washington’s leadership, was insistent upon underscoring Du Bois’s Northern “New England” educated background. He wrote, Here is another negro “educator,” to use the current term, not brought up like Washington among the negroes of the South and to the manner of the Southern negro born, but one educated in New England—one who never saw a camp-meeting till he was grown to manhood and went among the people of his color as a teacher.
While the reviewer found “the whole book is interesting, especially to a Southerner,” he honed in on Du Bois’s strong critique of Washington’s accommodationism with its lack of political action and Du Bois’s calls for “1. The right to vote; 2. Civic equality; 3. The education of youth according to ability.” Du Bois was particularly concerned that African Americans were given access to education, as that would open the potential for the greatness of the race and nurture its culture. What the reviewer saw in Du Bois’s work, however, was a special pleading for black civil rights. Given the pervasive belief of African Americans as an inferior people and the reviewer’s acceptance of such racism, he tried to show fair-mindedness by stating that black people’s best friends and worst enemies did not understand them because of “The Veil.” Nonetheless, the reviewer saw African Americans as a “peculiar people.”
What the review of The Souls of Black Folk recognized as an important document constructing a civil rights movement for African Americans, he quickly dismissed by stating, Throughout it should be recalled that it is the thought of a negro of Northern education who has lived long among his brethren of the South yet who cannot fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethren know by instinct . . .
This reference to Du Bois’s inauthenticity to truly speak for Southern black people has an eerie feeling as we continue to grapple with race in the twenty-first century. Certainly, at the time, Du Bois acquiesced in the essentialistic notion of race by stating that in his youth he would go South to “become a Negro.” 1
By the end of the 1920s, though Du Bois was removed from such ideas and most certainly by the time of the Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision striking down segregation, Du Bois had come to see race as a sociohistorical construct intertwined with class. Throughout his life, Du Bois, however discouraged or embittered he became, remained a strong believer and proponent of civil rights for African Americans.
The roots of Du Bois’s thought and the cultural framework erected to address the condition of African Americans are brilliantly laid out in Stephanie Shaw’s important book W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk. Shaw’s examination of Du Bois’s tone will certainly stand as the reigning interpretation of The Souls of Black Folk.
In dissecting the work, Shaw uncovers the philosophical, literary, and historical acumen that Du Bois brought to the text. Du Bois’s training in Germany on philosophical and social thought deeply influenced his formulations of African American thought and the manner in which they experienced and helped shape America. Although there is a current of essentialistic thinking regarding African American double consciousness, it is also clear that Du Bois’s ideas about race and racial formation are well grounded in history. Therefore, race is not so much a natural or biological entity but rather the product of historical and cultural construction.
Race is also political. Shaw insightfully examines the context of American democracy in which Du Bois situates the lived experiences of African Americans. But more importantly, Shaw recognizes that African Americans are not isolated globally. Recognizing that “three quarters of the world” is colored and that the “Negro is a seventh son” demonstrates a Pan-Africanist mind-set that Du Bois was beginning to develop.
The literary eloquence of The Souls of Black Folk operates on two levels almost simultaneously. On one level is a deep personal, conversational tone that Du Bois takes as he is addressing his readers. Then within that level are layers of analysis that carefully, and sometimes sharply, articulate what it means to live in a world divided by this “Veil.” Shaw masterfully breaks this down in clear honest prose that enables us to better understand and appreciate Du Bois’s examination of the African American experience.
Even more helpful are Shaw’s endnotes. They are not only useful for pointing out important sources of Du Bois’s thought, but, in this explanatory manner, they provide a solid arena for examining various scholarly interpretations of Du Bois’s thought. The text and the notes clearly show the enormous depth of Du Bois’s thinking. One closes Shaw’s book fully realizing the enduring impact of The Souls of Black Folk on African American intellectual history, literature, and philosophy.
This can be most seen in the development of African American modernism that black artists and writers bequeathed to American culture by means of the New Negro Renaissance. Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach’s Along the Streets of Bronzeville and Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani’s Escape from New York are welcome volumes to a much-needed expansion and revision of the conventional wisdom regarding the Harlem Renaissance.
Schlabach’s book is notable in forging this revision by her focus on Chicago’s important role in shaping the New Negro Renaissance. It is puzzling why this Midwestern urban site, to which thousands of Southern African Americans migrated, and which housed many black cultural art forms from music to literature to art, has not received deeper study. Now, of course, that is changing, and Schlabach’s book can be credited as a necessary first step in understanding the rich literary topography of black Chicago. One key to that understanding is where Chicago’s black literary landscape fits within the Afro-American traditional rendering of the New Negro Renaissance. Schlabach situates this within the intervening years between 1935 (traditionally seen as the close of the Harlem Renaissance) and the 1960s Black Arts Movement. That may be a conveniently neat chronological alignment but a longue durée may be more appropriate historically. After all, the Great Migration of African Americans to the Northeast and Midwest (as well as the West) owes a great deal to not only the creations of Afro-Modernism but also a culturally integrative transformation of what it means to be an American.
Schlabach points out that for black Chicagoans, this produced a great deal of anxiety intra- and interracially. Bronzeville, like Harlem, became a safe space that nurtured black cultural productions that over time induced a cultural integration that offered new representations of African Americans and their experiences within America. The leaders of this cultural renaissance Schlabach correctly points out were Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. Their work, she states, “involved complex and compelling debates on the future of their identities—identities poised at the precarious intersection of domestic and transnational politics, modernity, urbanism, segregation, and cosmopolitanism” (p. 94).
These debates are also at the center of Baldwin and Makalani’s collection of essays. Indeed, the wonderful contribution about these two volumes is that the edited collection of essays fleshes out the above quoted sentence by Schlabach. Moreover, Robin D. G. Kelley’s concise and richly illuminating foreword provides the historical context for the transnational literary and cultural exchanges that emerged as a result of the New Negro Renaissance.
These three books demonstrate that the cultural transformation of American identity and African American representations, whether culturally or politically, have come to fruition. The complexities, both literary and sociological, that Schlabach addresses can be seen not only in the rise and influence of institutions like the Chicago Defender and the literary/political writings of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks but also in the thick sociological description of Bronzeville by Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. The culmination is the emergence of America’s first black president, Barack Hussein Obama.
Significantly, the election of a Chicago resident with transnational connections produced an intellectually sturdy cosmopolitanism signaled the changes in American identity that started, in many respects, when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk. Thus, these three books before us are the necessary guides for an understanding of the Black Renaissance’s past, present, and most likely the future.