Intro African American History
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duboiswashingtonthe-souls-of-black-folk.pptThe Souls of Black Folk (1903)
By
W.E.B. Du Bois
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
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On the word
Historical Context:
Writing in the Wake of a failed Reconstruction
1868 and 1870: The fourteenth and fifteenth amendments pass to recognize black Americans as U.S. citizens, to grant the right to vote, and to provide equal protection under the law.
1865: Freedman's Bureau Bill, which created the Freedman's Bureau, was initiated by President Abraham Lincoln and was intended to last for one year after the end of the Civil War. It was passed on March 3, 1865, by Congress to aid former slaves through legal food and housing, oversight, education, health care, and employment contracts with private landowners. It became a key agency during Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. The Bureau was part of the Unit. Headed by Union Army General Oliver Howard, the Bureau was operational from 1865 to 1872. It was disbanded under President Ulysses S. Grant. At the end of the war, the Bureau's main role was providing emergency food, housing, and medical aid to refugees, though it also helped reunite families. Later, it focused its work on helping the freedmen adjust to their conditions of freedom. Its main job was setting up work opportunities and supervising labor contracts. It soon became, in effect, a military court that handled legal issues.
1872: The modest gains of Reconstruction begin to be violently curtailed, racial terrorism and local politics conspired to keep blacks from the polls, limitations are placed on black employment opportunities and property ownership, and interracial marriages are made illegal.
1884-1900- Over 2000 Blacks are lynched in systematic attempts to deny the voting franchise.
1895- Booker T. Washington delivers his “Atlanta Compromise”
1896- Plessy vs Ferguson- The Supreme Court’s decision marks the abysmal failures of the promises of Reconstruction
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Note his dissertation
The Failure of Reconstruction Part I
“The Dawn of Freedom” and
the Promise of the Freedmen’s Bureau
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
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- The Success and Failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau as the “heavy heritage” of the New Negro.
- From slavery to peonage and second-class citizenship
“The Atlanta Compromise” (1895)
Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement. The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist 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. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.
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Talking points,
National hero
Industrial education
Difficult position
Radical scapegoat/ sellout/ or American hero- Here- he is though advocating first and foremost
WORK-Servan-Hehel
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” and “The Atlanta Compromise” (1895)
Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,--
First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,Third, higher education of Negro youth,--and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority forthe Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.
The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights,made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO. And Mr.Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career.
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Talking Points
(Du Bois’ retorts)
- Enfranchisement
- Civic Equality
- Education according to ability
The Failure of Reconstruction Part II :
“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”
The bright ideals of the past,--physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,--all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,--all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,--the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,--the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,--else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,--all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.
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Talking Points:
- The Ballot
- The Negro Problem as a test of the Republic
- The partnership of Work, Culture, and Liberty
- Compare Du Bois’s concerns with Hegel’s nationalist progression towards “Absolute Spirit.”
- Du Bois’s second and third ideal states? From Athens to Germany.
- The American Republic as unrealized synthesis
Langston Hughes
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Master/Slave Then-Dialecical-History-reconfrontation,
Who else is being refashioned
Blindness of the master, does it compar to they’re blindness?
Eat-wel-go strong- Dialectic
Beauty/ Shame (virtue- Plato
Double Consciounsess
National Synthesis (Hegel) in Beauty (Plato)
America juxtaposed against dr brother, making it continental, not pre historu
