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The Sorrow Songs

I walk through the churchyard To lay this body down;

I know moon-rise, I know star-rise; I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight; I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms, I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day, And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,

When I lay this body down.

N e g ro S o n g.*

T h ey that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days –– Sorrow Songs –– for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall* seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude gran- deur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in

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beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song –– the rhythmic cry of the slave –– stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and mis- understood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singu- lar Port Royal experiment* after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim* and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers* sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again.

There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the Freedman’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode, –– four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women, –– led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black

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bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.

Since their day they have been imitated –– sometimes well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quar- tettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know some- thing of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:

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The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean,* but knowing well the meaning of its music.

This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds “The Coming of John”:

“You may bury me in the East, You may bury me in the West, But I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,”*

–– the voice of exile. Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from this forest of

melody –– songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular cur- rency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfil its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.

The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know, –– “Swing low, sweet chariot,” –– whose bars begin the life story of “Alexander Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,” a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens “The Wings of Atalanta,” and the more familiar “Been a-listening.” The seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning –– “My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall”; a strain of this is placed

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before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of groping –– “My way’s cloudy” –– begins “The Meaning of Progress”; the ninth is the song of this chapter –– “Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,” –– a pæan of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of songs –– “Steal away,” –– sprung from “The Faith of the Fathers.”

There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to me a step removed from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley, “Bright sparkles,” one phrase of which heads “The Black Belt”; the Easter carol, “Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge, “My mother’s took her flight and gone home”; and that burst of melody hovering over “The Passing of the First-Born” –– “I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful world on high.”

These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of which “You may bury me in the East” is the first, and songs like “March on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the second. The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody, as “Swanee River” and “Old Black Joe.”* Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and imitations –– the Negro “minstrel” songs, many of the “gospel” hymns, and some of the contemporary “coon” songs, –– a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,” which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were

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seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.

The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature’s heart. Life was a “rough and rolling sea” like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the “Wilderness” was the home of God, and the “lonesome valley” led to the way of life. “Winter’ll soon be over,” was the picture of life and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunder- storms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes, –– at times the rumbling seemed to them “mournful,” at times imperious:

“My Lord calls me, He calls me by the thunder, The trumpet sounds it in my soul.”*

The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:

“Dere ’s no rain to wet you, Dere ’s no sun to burn you, Oh, push along, believer, I want to go home.”*

The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:

“O Lord, keep me from sinking down,”*

and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:

“Jesus is dead and God’s gone away.”*

Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:

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Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain:

“Yonder ’s my ole mudder, Been waggin’ at de hill so long; ’Bout time she cross over, Git home bime-by.”*

Elsewhere comes the cry of the “motherless” and the “Farewell, farewell, my only child.”

Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories –– the frivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:

A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full heart and a troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that sings in the German folk-song:

“Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net.”*

Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps –– who

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knows? –– back to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:

“Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave, But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.”*

The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of Zion,” is quaintly turned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says:

“There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart.”*

As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of the allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of verses have always attracted me, –– the one that heads this chapter, of one line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, “Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third are descriptions of the Last Judgment, –– the one a late improvisation, with some traces of outside influence:

“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling, And the moon drips away into blood, And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God, Blessed be the name of the Lord.”*

And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:

“Michael, haul the boat ashore, Then you’ll hear the horn they blow, Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound, Trumpet sound the world around, Trumpet sound for rich and poor, Trumpet sound the Jubilee, Trumpet sound for you and me.”*

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Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope –– a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Æschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civiliza- tion flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed* we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song –– soft, stirring melody in an ill- harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and

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woof of this nation, –– we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below –– swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

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And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.

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T H E A F T E R - T H O U G H T

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.) Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

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A P P E N D I X I

T H E C O N S E RVAT I O N O F R AC E S

[Du Bois gave ‘The Conservation of Races’ as a speech before the first conference of the American Negro Academy, the scholarly society founded by Alexander Crummell. In it, Du Bois discusses a number of the themes which were to be revised and further elaborated in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’. The speech was subsequently published by the Academy in 1897 as the second of the organization’s Occasional Papers.]

T h e American Negro has always felt an intense personal interest in dis- cussions as to the origins and destinies of races: primarily because back of most discussions of race with which he is familiar, have lurked certain assumptions as to his natural abilities, as to his political, intellectual and moral status, which he felt were wrong. He has, consequently, been led to deprecate and minimize race distinctions, to believe intensely that out of one blood God created all nations, and to speak of human brotherhood as though it were the possibility of an already dawning to-morrow.

Nevertheless, in our calmer moments we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met, and the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types is not only of intense and living interest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind.

It is necessary, therefore, in planning our movements, in guiding our future development, that at times we rise above the pressing, but smaller questions of separate schools and cars, wage-discrimination and lynch law, to survey the whole question of race in human philosophy and to lay, on a basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy and higher ideals which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in the practical difficulties of every day. For it is certain that all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural law, and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest, which is against the constitution of the world, is vain. The question, then, which we must seriously consider is this: What is the real meaning of Race; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and what lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising Negro people?

When we thus come to inquire into the essential difference of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion. Many criteria of race differences have in the past been proposed, as color, hair, cranialC

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measurements and language. And manifestly, in each of these respects, human beings differ widely. They vary in color, for instance, from the marble-like pallor of the Scandinavian to the rich, dark brown of the Zulu, passing by the creamy Slav, the yellow Chinese, the light brown Sicilian and the brown Egyptian. Men vary, too, in the texture of hair from the obstinately straight hair of the Chinese to the obstinately tufted and frizzled hair of the Bushman. In measurement of heads, again, men vary; from the broad-headed Tartar to the medium-headed European and the narrow-headed Hottentot; or, again in language, from the highly-inflected Roman tongue to the monosyllabic Chinese. All these physical character- istics are patent enough, and if they agreed with each other it would be very easy to classify mankind. Unfortunately for scientists, however, these criteria of race are most exasperatingly intermingled. Color does not agree with texture of hair, for many of the dark races have straight hair; nor does color agree with the breadth of the head, for the yellow Tartar has a broader head than the German; nor, again, has the science of language as yet succeeded in clearing up the relative authority of these various and contradictory criteria. The final word of science, so far, is that we have at least two, perhaps three, great families of human beings –– the whites and Negroes, possibly the yellow race. That other races have arisen from the intermingling of the blood of these two. This broad division of the world’s races which men like Huxley and Raetzel have introduced as more nearly true than the old five-race scheme of Blumenbach, is nothing more than an acknowledgment that, so far as purely physical characteristics are con- cerned, the differences between men do not explain all the differences of their history. It declares, as Darwin himself said, that great as is the physical unlikeness of the various races of men their likenesses are greater, and upon this rests the whole scientific doctrine of Human Brotherhood.

Although the wonderful developments of human history teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles which groups of men have played in Human Progress, yet there are differences –– subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be –– which have silently but definitely separated men into groups. While these subtle forces have generally followed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities, they have at other times swept across and ignored these. At all times, however, they have divided human beings into races, which, while they perhaps trans- cend scientific definition, nevertheless, are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.

If this be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides

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the central thought of all history. What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.

Turning to real history, there can be no doubt, first, as to the wide- spread, nay, universal, prevalence of the race idea, the race spirit, the race ideal, and as to its efficiency as the vastest and most ingenious invention for human progress. We, who have been reared and trained under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laisser-faire philosophy of Adam Smith, are loath to see and loath to acknowledge this patent fact of human history. We see the Pharaohs, Caesars, Toussaints and Napoleons of history and forget the vast races of which they were but epitomized expressions. We are apt to think in our American impatience, that while it may have been true in the past that closed race groups made history, that here in conglomerate America nous avons changer tout cela* –– we have changed all that, and have no need of this ancient instrument of progress. This assumption of which the Negro people are especially fond, can not be established by a careful consideration of history.

We find upon the world’s stage today eight distinctly differentiated races, in the sense in which History tells us the word must be used. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia. There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians, the Esquimaux and the South Sea Islanders; these larger races, too, are far from homogeneous; the Slav includes the Czech, the Magyar, the Pole and the Russian; the Teuton includes the German, the Scandinavian and the Dutch; the English include the Scotch, the Irish and the conglomerate American. Under Romance nations the widely-differing Frenchman, Italian, Sicilian and Spaniard are comprehended. The term Negro is, perhaps, the most indefinite of all, combining the Mulattoes and Zamboes of America* and the Egyptians, Bantus and Bushmen of Africa. Among the Hindoos are traces of widely differing nations, while the great Chinese, Tartar, Corean and Japanese families fall under the one designation –– Mongolian.

The question now is: What is the real distinction between these nations? Is it the physical differences of blood, color and cranial measure- ments? Certainly we must all acknowledge that physical differences play a great part, and that, with wide exceptions and qualifications, these eight

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great races of to-day follow the cleavage of physical race distinctions; the English and Teuton represent the white variety of mankind; the Mon- golian, the yellow; the Negroes, the black. Between these are many crosses and mixtures, where Mongolian and Teuton have blended into the Slav, and other mixtures have produced the Romance nations and the Semites. But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper dif- ferences –– the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences –– undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life. The whole process which has brought about these race differentiations has been a growth, and the great characteristic of this growth has been the differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and the integration of physical differences.

The age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents the maximum of physical differences. They were practically vast families, and there were as many groups as families. As the families came together to form cities the physical differences lessened, purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile, and all who lived within the city bounds became gradually to be regarded as members of the group; i.e., there was a slight and slow breaking down of physical barriers. This, however, was accompanied by an increase of the spiritual and social differences between cities. This city became husbandmen, this, merchants, another warriors, and so on. The ideals of life for which the different cities struggled were different. When at last cities began to coalesce into nations there was another breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men. The larger and broader differences of color, hair and physical proportions were not by any means ignored, but myriads of minor differences disappeared, and the sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present division of races as indicated by physical researches. At the same time the spiritual and physical differences of race groups which consti- tuted the nations became deep and decisive. The English nation stood for constitutional liberty and commercial freedom; the German nation for science and philosophy; the Romance nations stood for literature and art, and the other race groups are striving, each in its own way, to develop for civilization its particular message, its particular ideal, which shall help to guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human life for which we all long, that

“one far off Divine event.”*

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This has been the function of race differences up to the present time. What shall be its function in the future? Manifestly some of the great races of today –– particularly the Negro race –– have not as yet given to civilization the full spiritual message which they are capable of giving. I will not say that the Negro race has as yet given no message to the world, for it is still a mooted question among scientists as to just how far Egyptian civilization was Negro in its origin; if it was not wholly Negro, it was certainly very closely allied. Be that as it may, however, the fact still remains that the full, complete Negro message of the whole Negro race has not as yet been given to the world: that the messages and ideal of the yellow race have not been completed, and that the striving of the mighty Slavs has but begun. The question is, then: How shall this message be delivered; how shall these various ideals be realized? The answer is plain: By the development of these race groups, not as individuals, but as races. For the development of Japanese genius, Japanese literature and art, Japanese spirit, only Japanese, bound and welded together, Japanese inspired by one vast ideal, can work out in its fullness the wonderful message which Japan has for the nations of the earth. For the development of Negro genius, of Negro literature and art, of Negro spirit, only Negroes bound and welded together, Negroes inspired by one vast ideal, can work out in its fullness the great message we have for humanity. We cannot reverse history; we are subject to the same natural laws as other races, and if the Negro is ever to be a factor in the world’s history –– if among the gaily-colored banners that deck the broad ramparts of civilization is to hang one uncompromising black, then it must be placed there by black hands, fashioned by black heads and hallowed by the travail of 200,000,000 black hearts beating in one glad song of jubilee.

For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people –– the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America –– must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint, the Saviour,* but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.

It may, however, be objected here that the situation of our race in America renders this attitude impossible; that our sole hope of salvation lies in our being able to lose our race identity in the commingled blood of the nation; and that any other course would merely increase the friction of

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races which we call race prejudice, and against which we have so long and so earnestly fought.

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsi- bility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro people cannot be marshalled to do the bidding of the race. They stand back to make room for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry under the veil of race pride.

Is this right? Is it rational? Is it good policy? Have we in America a distinct mission as a race –– a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is self-obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire?

If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find it, historic- ally, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feeling, in ideals of two different races; if, now, this difference exists touching territory, laws, language, or even religion, it is manifest that these people cannot live in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion; if there is a satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. Here, it seems to me, is the reading of the riddle that puzzles so many of us. We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland. We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger

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of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day. We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy. As such, it is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development.

For the accomplishment of these ends we need race organizations: Negro colleges, Negro newspapers, Negro business organizations, a Negro school of literature and art, and an intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the Negro mind, which we may call a Negro Academy. Not only is all this necessary for positive advance, it is absolutely imperative for negative defense. Let us not deceive ourselves at our situation in this country. Weighted with a heritage of moral iniquity from our past history, hard pressed in the economic world by foreign immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and pitied everywhere; our one haven of refuge is ourselves, and but one means of advance, our own belief in our great destiny, our own implicit trust in our ability and worth. There is no power under God’s high heaven that can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people. But –– and here is the rub –– they must be honest, fearlessly criticising their own faults, zealously correcting them; they must be earnest. No people that laughs at itself, and ridicules itself, and wishes to God it was anything but itself ever wrote its name in history; it must be inspired with the Divine faith of our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of earth a Divine truth that shall make them free. And such a people must be united; not merely united for the organized theft of political spoils, not united to disgrace religion with whoremongers and ward-heelers; not united merely to protest and pass resolutions, but united to stop the ravages of consumption among the Negro people, united to keep black boys from loafing, gambling and crime; united to guard the purity of black women and to reduce that vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell; and united in serious organizations, to determine by careful conference and thoughtful interchange of opinion the broad lines of policy and action for the American Negro.

This, is the reason for being which the Amerian Negro Academy has. It aims at once to be the epitome and expression of the intellect of the black- blooded people of America, the exponent of the race ideals of one of the world’s great races. As such, the Academy must, if successful, be

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(a). Representative in character. (b). Impartial in conduct. (c). Firm in leadership.

It must be representative in character; not in that it represents all inter- ests or all factions, but in that it seeks to comprise something of the best thought, the most unselfish striving and the highest ideals. There are scattered in forgotten nooks and corners throughout the land, Negroes of some considerable training, of high minds, and high motives, who are unknown to their fellows, who exert far too little influence. These the Negro Academy should strive to bring into touch with each other and to give them a common mouth-piece.

The Academy should be impartial in conduct; while it aims to exalt the people it should aim to do so by truth –– not by lies, by honesty –– not by flattery. It should continually impress the fact upon the Negro people that they must not expect to have things done for them –– they m u s t d o f o r t h e m s e lv e s; that they have on their hands a vast work of self- reformation to do, and that a little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving would do us more credit and benefit than a thousand Force or Civil Rights bills.

Finally, the American Negro Academy must point out a practical path of advance to the Negro people; there lie before every Negro today hun- dreds of questions of policy and right which must be settled and which each one settles now, not in accordance with any rule, but by impulse or individual preference; for instance: What should be the attitude of Negroes toward the educational qualification for voters? What should be our attitude toward separate schools? How should we meet discrimin- ations on railways and in hotels? Such questions need not so much specific answers for each part as a general expression of policy, and nobody should be better fitted to announce such a policy than a representative honest Negro Academy.

All this, however, must come in time after careful organization and long conference. The immediate work before us should be practical and have direct bearing upon the situation of the Negro. The historical work of collecting the laws of the United States and of the various States of the Union with regard to the Negro is a work of such magnitude and import- ance that no body but one like this could think of undertaking it. If we could accomplish that one task we would justify our existence.

In the field of Sociology an appalling work lies before us. First, we must unflinchingly and bravely face the truth, not with apologies, but with solemn earnestness. The Negro Academy ought to sound a note of warn- ing that would echo in every black cabin in the land: Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us; we are diseased, we are developing

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criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure. The Negro Academy should stand and pro- claim this over the housetops, crying with Garrison:* I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. The Academy should seek to gather about it the talented, unselfish men, the pure and noble-minded women, to fight an army of devils that disgraces our manhood and our womanhood. There does not stand today upon God’s earth a race more capable in muscle, in intellect, in morals, than the American Negro, if he will bend his energies in the right direction; if he will

Burst his birth’s invidious bar And grasp the skirts of happy chance, And breast the blows of circumstance,

And grapple with his evil star.*

In science and morals, I have indicated two fields of work for the Academy. Finally, in practical policy, I wish to suggest the following Academy Creed:

1. We believe that the Negro people, as a race, have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity, which no other race can make.

2. We believe it the duty of the Americans of Negro descent, as a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the Negro people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility.

3. We believe that, unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic, and religious harmony as the white and colored people of America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country.

4. As a means to this end we advocate, not such social equality between these races as would disregard human likes and dislikes, but such a social equilibrium as would, throughout all the complicated relations of life, give due and just consideration to culture, ability, and moral worth, whether they be found under white or black skins.

5. We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races –– commonly called the Negro Problem –– lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery. We believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills.

6. We believe that the second great step toward a better adjustment of the relations between the races, should be a more impartial selection of

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ability in the economic and intellectual world, and a greater respect for personal liberty and worth, regardless of race. We believe that only earn- est efforts on the part of the white people of this country will bring much needed reform in these matters.

7. On the basis of the foregoing declaration, and firmly believing in our high destiny, we, as American Negroes, are resolved to strive in every honorable way for the realization of the best and highest aims, for the development of strong manhood and pure womanhood, and for the rear- ing of a race ideal in America and Africa, to the glory of God and the uplifting of the Negro people.

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A P P E N D I X I I

T H E TA L E N T E D T E N T H

[Du Bois contributed ‘The Talented Tenth’ to the 1903 anthology The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today. It amplifies some of the concerns expressed in The Souls of Black Folk regarding the higher education and social responsibilities of the black ‘aristocracy of talent and character’.]

T h e Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessar- ily men: if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools –– intelligence, broad sym- pathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it –– this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must under- lie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.

If this be true –– and who can deny it –– three tasks lay before me: first to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how these men may be educated and developed: and thirdly, to show their relation to the Negro problem.

You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legal- ized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to

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rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice; and Benjamin Banneker,* the almanac maker, voiced their longings when he said to Thomas Jefferson, “I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am of the African race, and in colour which is natural to them, of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom and inhuman captivity to which too many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings which proceed from that free and unequalled liberty with which you are favored, and which I hope you will willingly allow, you have mercifully received from the immediate hand of that Being from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift.

“Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms of the British crown were exerted with every powerful effort, in order to reduce you to a state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential preserva- tion, you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquil- ity which you enjoy, you have mercifully received, and that a peculiar blessing of heaven.

“This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state of Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its condition. It was then that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush something of medicine, and Lemuel Haynes,* to whom Middlebury College gave a honorary A.M. in 1804. These and others we may call the Revo- lutionary group of distinguished Negroes –– they were persons of marked ability, leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among the best of their time. They strove by word and deed to save the color line from becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do was nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold. So they passed into forgetfulness.

But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of

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the century came other exceptional men. Some were natural sons of unnatural fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race of educated mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men’s rights. There was Ira Aldridge,* whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying in the Wilderness, David Walker,* and saying:

“I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is asleep, or that he made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their mines and work their farms, or they cannot believe history, sacred or profane. I ask every man who has a heart, and is blessed with the privilege of believ- ing –– Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures? Do you say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and permits them to keep our fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families, would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began –– I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have never given you the least provocation –– would He be to us a God of Justice? If you will allow that we are men, who feel for each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders with which you have and do continue to afflict us?”

This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to the terrors of abolitionism.

In 1831 there met that first Negro convention* in Philadelphia, at which the world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race and slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that “Laws as cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren (without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion –– looks noble and prides himself because he bears not the name of Christian.” Side by side this free Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until they merged into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man became the first subscriber to Garrison’s “Liberator,” to the day when Negro soldiers made the Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders worked shoulder to shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of which would have been impossible without them. There was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummell, and above all, Frederick Douglass* –– what

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would the abolition movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well wrought culture said silently more than all the drawn periods of orators –– they were the men who made American slavery impossible. As Maria Weston Chapman* once said, from the school of anti-slavery agitation “a throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples.”

Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith,* graduated from famous foreign uni- versities. Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.*

After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders: Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne.* Through polit- ical organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at the plow and not in the Senate –– a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow, but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of rascals, that he now is. This all sane men know even if they dare not say it.

And so we come to the present –– a day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double- faced dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people? The “exceptions” of course. And yet so sure as this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: “These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime –– these are the happy rule.” Of course they are the rule, because a

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silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspir- ation from black folk. A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and char- acter. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves?

Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.

How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it –– I willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the train- ing of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their

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bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in the beginning were the favored sons of the freedom trained. Out of the colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase, Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build? At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth. Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge, down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of property. It was a miracle –– the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life –– why, what has Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly.

Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test of time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life, really live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their less fortu- nate fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a college course, there are to-day in the United States thirty-four institutions giving something above high school training to Negroes and designed especially for this race.

Three of these were established in border States before the War; thirteen were planted by the Freedmen’s Bureau in the years 1864–1869; nine were established between 1870 and 1880 by various church bodies; five were established after 1881 by Negro churches, and four are state institutions supported by United States’ agricultural funds. In most cases the college departments are small adjuncts to high and common school work. As a matter of fact six institutions –– Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Shaw, Wilberforce and Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and number of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred and fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University. Here students from the grammar grades, after a three years’ high school course, take a college

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course of 136 weeks. One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek; one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and social science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to mathematics, and one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy.

In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin College,* and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was the great pioneer in the work of blotting out the color line in colleges, and has more Negro graduates by far than any other Northern college.

The total number of Negro college graduates up to 1899, (several of the graduates of that year not being reported), was as follows:

Of these graduates 2,079 were men and 252 were women; 50 per cent. of Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent. of the Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black neighbors and relatives.

The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial ques- tion, to be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living? It has been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could

Negro Colleges White Colleges

Before ’76 137 75 ’75–80 143 22 ’80–85 250 31 ’85–90 413 43 ’90–95 465 66 ’95–99 475 88

Class Unknown 57 64

Total 1,914 390

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find nothing to do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a colored college man working at menial service, etc. Fortu- nately, returns as to occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta conference, are quite full –– nearly sixty per cent. of the total number of graduates.

This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions as to the occupations of all college-bred Negroes. Of 1,312 persons reported, there were:

Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students and professional men; over 6 per cent. are farmers, artisans and merchants, and 4 per cent. are in government service. In detail the occupations are as follows:

Per Cent.

Teachers, 53.4 Clergymen, 16.8 Physicians, etc., 6.3 Students, 5.6 Lawyers, 4.7 In Govt. Service, 4.0 In Business, 3.6 Farmers and Artisans, 2.7 Editors, Secretaries and Clerks, 2.4 Miscellaneous, .5

Occupations of College-Bred Men. Teachers:

Presidents and Deans, 19 Teacher of Music, 7 Professors, Principals and Teachers, 675 Total 701

Clergymen: Bishop, 1 Chaplains U. S. Army, 2 Missionaries, 9 Presiding Elders, 12 Preachers, 197 Total 221

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These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro. He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people need social leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully evolved. The preacher was, even before the war, the group leader of the Negroes, and the church their greatest social institution. Naturally this preacher was ignorant and often immoral, and the problem of replacing the older type by better educated men has been a difficult one. Both by direct work and by direct influence on other preachers, and on congregations, the college-bred preacher has an opportunity for

Physicians: Doctors of Medicine, 76 Druggists, 4 Dentists, 3 Total 83

Students, 74 Lawyers, 62 Civil Service:

U. S. Minister Plenipotentiary, 1 U. S. Consul, 1 U. S. Deputy Collector, 1 U. S. Gauger, 1 U. S. Postmasters, 2 U. S. Clerks, 44 State Civil Service, 2 City Civil Service, 1 Total 53

Business Men: Merchants, etc., 30 Managers, 13 Real Estate Dealers, 4 Total 47

Farmers, 26 Clerks and Secretaries:

Secretary of National Societies, 7 Clerks, etc., 15 Total 22

Artisans, 9 Editors, 9 Miscellaneous, 5

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reformatory work and moral inspiration, the value of which cannot be overestimated.

It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the Negro college has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how vast a work, how mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To furnish five millions and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood, in one generation, was not only a very difficult undertaking, but a very important one, in that, it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro child an attainable ideal. It brought the masses of the blacks in contact with modern civilization, made black men the leaders of their communities and trainers of the new generation. In this work college-bred Negroes were first teachers, and then teachers of teachers. And here it is that the broad culture of college work has been of peculiar value. Know- ledge of life and its wider meaning, has been the point of the Negro’s deepest ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been simply for bread winning, but also for human culture, has been of inestimable value in the training of these men.

In earlier years the two occupations of preacher and teacher were prac- tically the only ones open to the black college graduate. Of later years a larger diversity of life among his people, has opened new avenues of employment. Nor have these college men been paupers and spendthrifts; 557 college-bred Negroes owned in 1899, $1,342,862,50 worth of real estate, (assessed value) or $2,411 per family. The real value of the total accumulations of the whole group is perhaps about $10,000,000, or $5,000 a piece. Pitiful, is it not, beside the fortunes of oil kings and steel trusts, but after all is the fortune of the millionaire the only stamp of true and successful living? Alas! it is, with many, and there’s the rub.

The problem of training the Negro is to-day immensely complicated by the fact that the whole question of the efficiency and appropriateness of our present systems of education, for any kind of child, is a matter of active debate, in which final settlement seems still afar off. Consequently it often happens that persons arguing for or against certain systems of edu- cation for Negroes, have these controversies in mind and miss the real question at issue. The main question, so far as the Southern Negro is concerned, is: What under the present circumstance, must a system of education do in order to raise the Negro as quickly as possible in the scale of civilization? The answer to this question seems to me clear: It must strengthen the Negro’s character, increase his knowledge and teach him to earn a living. Now it goes without saying, that it is hard to do all these things simultaneously or suddenly, and that at the same time it will not do to give all the attention to one and neglect the others; we could give black boys trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of ex-slaves; we

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might simply increase their knowledge of the world, but this would not necessarily make them wish to use this knowledge honestly; we might seek to strengthen character and purpose, but to what end if this people have nothing to eat or to wear? A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, not is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. If then we start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a heritage of bad habits, our system of training must set before itself two great aims –– the one dealing with knowledge and character, the other part seeking to give the child the technical knowledge necessary for him to earn a living under the present circumstances. These objects are accomplished in part by the opening of the common schools on the one, and of the industrial schools on the other. But only in part, for there must also be trained those who are to teach these schools –– men and women of knowledge and culture and technical skill who understand modern civilization, and have the training and apti- tude to impart it to the children under them. There must be teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common and industrial school training, without first (and I say first advisedly) without first providing for the higher training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the winds. School houses do not teach themselves –– piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strength- ened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter days, has so damp- ened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of higher training which made the Negro public school possible, and make Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and Straight, those col- leges born of the faith and sacrifice of the abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South the 30,000 teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work of these higher schools, are using to teach their own new experiments. If Hampton, Tuskegee and the hundred other industrial schools prove in the future to be as successful as they deserve to be, then their success in training black artisans for the South, will be due primarily to the white colleges of the North and the black colleges of the South, which trained the teachers who to-day conduct these institutions. There was a time when the American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at one end and Mark Hopkins* at the other, represented the highest ideal of human training. But in these eager days it would seem

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that we have changed all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark Hopkins.

I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount neces- sity of teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully; or seem to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I do say, and insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk with its vision of success, to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and to teach the teachers of the public schools.

But I have already said that human education is not simply a matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life –– the training of one’s home, of one’s daily companions, of one’s social class. Now the black boy of the South moves in a black world –– a world with its own leaders, its own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he gets by far the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes of this dark world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the education which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the group-leaders of the Negro people –– the physicians and clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of the surrounding world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the higher schools. Can such culture train- ing of group leaders be neglected? Can we afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the leaders of thought among Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that they will have no leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained demagogues will still hold the places they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless misguided rabble.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the founding of Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education since the war, has been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless, I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men; there are two means of making the carpenter a man, each equally important: the first is to give the group and community in which he works, liberally trained teachers and leaders to teach him and his family what life means; the second is to give him sufficient intelligence and technical skill to make him an efficient workman; the first object demands the Negro college and college-bred men –– not a quantity of such colleges,

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but a few of excellent quality; not too many college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to raise the Talented Tenth to leadership; the second object demands a good system of common schools, well-taught, conveniently located and properly equipped.

The Sixth Atlanta Conference truly said in 1901: “We call the attention of the Nation to the fact that less than one

million of the three million Negro children of school age, are at present regularly attending school, and these attend a session which lasts only a few months.

“We are to-day deliberately rearing millions of our citizens in ignor- ance, and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by educational qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the land have no opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher. In the discussion as to the proper training of Negro children after they leave the public schools, we have forgotten that they are not yet decently provided with public schools.

“Propositions are beginning to be made in the South to reduce the already meagre school facilities of Negroes. We congratulate the South on resisting, as much as it has, this pressure, and on the many millions it has spent on Negro education. But it is only fair to point out that Negro taxes and the Negroes’ share of the income from indirect taxes and endowments have fully repaid this expenditure, so that the Negro public school system has not in all probability cost the white taxpayers a single cent since the war.

“This is not fair. Negro schools should be a public burden, since they are a public benefit. The Negro has a right to demand good common school training at the hands of the States and the Nation since by their fault he is not in position to pay for this himself.”

What is the chief need for the building up of the Negro public school in the South? The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day above all else. This is the concurrent testimony of all who know the situation. For the supply of this great demand two things are needed –– institutions of higher education and money for school houses and salaries. It is usually assumed that a hundred or more institutions for Negro training are to-day turning out so many teachers and college-bred men that the race is threat- ened with an over-supply. This is sheer nonsense. There are to-day less than 3,000 living Negro college graduates in the United States, and less than 1,000 Negroes in college. Moreover, in the 164 schools for Negroes, 95 per cent of their students are doing elementary and secondary work, work which should be done in the public schools. Over half the remaining 2,157 students are taking high school studies. The mass of so-called “normal” schools for the Negro, are simply doing elementary common

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school work, or, at most, high school work, with a little instruction in methods. The Negro colleges and the post-graduate courses at other institutions are the only agencies for the broader and more careful training of teachers. The work of these institutions is hampered for lack of funds. It is getting increasingly difficult to get funds for training teachers in the best modern methods, and yet all over the South, from State Super- intendents, county officials, city boards and school principals comes the wail, “We need TEACHERS!” and teachers must be trained. As the fair- est minded of all white Southerners, Atticus G. Haygood,* once said: “The defects of colored teachers are so great as to create an urgent necessity for training better ones. Their excellencies and their successes are sufficient to justify the best hopes of success in the effort, and to vindicate the judg- ment of those who make large investments of money and service, to give to colored students opportunity for thoroughly preparing themselves for the work of teaching children of their people.”

The truth of this has been strikingly shown in the marked improvement of white teachers in the South. Twenty years ago the rank and file of white public school teachers were not as good as the Negro teachers. But they, by scholarships and good salaries, have been encouraged to thorough normal and collegiate preparation, while the Negro teachers have been discouraged by starvation wages and the idea that any training will do for a black teacher. If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as carpenters. But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching is wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse them living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense.

The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report for 1900: “For comparison between the white and colored enrollment in sec- ondary and higher education, I have added together the enrollment in high schools and secondary schools, with the attendance on colleges and universities, not being sure of the actual grade of work done in the col- leges and universities. The work done in the secondary schools is reported in such detail in this office, that there can be no doubt of its grade.”

He then makes the following comparisons of persons in every million enrolled in secondary and higher education:

And he concludes: “While the number in colored high schools and col- leges had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not

Whole Country Negroes 1880 4,362 1,289 1900 10,743 2,061

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kept pace with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from 30 per cent. to 24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored pupils, one (1) in one hundred was engaged in secondary and higher work, and that ratio has continued substantially for the past twenty years. If the ratio of colored population in secondary and higher education is to be equal to the average for the whole country, it must be increased to five times its present average.” And if this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies. How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We need Negro teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class normal schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher Negro education and it must be done.

Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of civiliza- tion, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for trade schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things as people once thought. The original idea was that the “Industrial” school was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing to work for it; it was to “do” things –– i.e.: become a center of productive industry, it was to be partially, if not wholly, self-supporting, and it was to teach trades. Admirable as were some of the ideas underlying this scheme, the whole thing simply would not work in practice; it was found that if you were to use time and material to teach trades thoroughly, you could not at the same time keep the industries on a commercial basis and make them pay. Many schools started out to do this on a large scale and went into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found also that it was possible to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him the full educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was a distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes in carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not actually learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade, that a noticeable change has come over the industrial schools. In the first place the idea of commercially remunerative industry in a school is being pushed rapidly to the background. There are still schools with shops and farms that bring an income, and schools that use student labour partially for the erection of their buildings and the furnish- ing of equipment. It is coming to be seen, however, in the education of the Negro, as clearly as it has been seen in the education of the youths the world over, that it is the boy and not the material product, that is the true object of education. Consequently the object of the industrial school came to be the thorough training of boys regardless of the cost of the training, so long as it was thoroughly well done.

Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not surmounted. In

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the first place modern industry has taken great strides since the war, and the teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long processes of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be today an intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To meet this situation the industrial schools began a further development; they estab- lished distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training of better class artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve for the purposes of general education, such of the simpler processes of elementary trade learning as were best suited therefor. In this differentiation of the Trade School and manual training, the best of the industrial schools simply followed the plain trend of the present educational epoch. A prominent educator tells us that, in Sweden, “In the beginning the economic concep- tion was generally adopted, and everywhere manual training was looked upon as a means of preparing the children of the common people to earn their living. But gradually it came to be recognized that manual training has a more elevated purpose, and one, indeed, more useful in the deeper meaning of the term. It came to be considered as an educative process for the complete moral, physical and intellectual development of the child.”

Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training schools we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and chief support. There was a time when any aged and wornout carpenter could teach in a trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for college-bred men by a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr. Booker T. Washington the firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers the son of a Negro senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and graduated at Harvard; the son of a Negro congressman and lawyer, trained in Latin and mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife, a woman who read Virgil and Homer in the same class room with me; he has as college chaplain, a classical graduate of Atlanta University; as teacher of science, a graduate of Fisk; as teacher of history, a graduate of Smith, –– indeed some thirty of his chief teachers are college graduates, and instead of studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buy- ing pianos for dirty cabins, they are at Mr. Washington’s right hand help- ing him in a noble work. And yet one of the effects of Mr. Washington’s propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the expediency of such training for Negroes, as these persons have had.

Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race trans- planted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the levers to

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uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work –– it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

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A P P E N D I X I I I

‘ S E L F - R E V I E W ’ A N D ‘ F I F T Y Y E A R S A F T E R ’

[In the autumn of 1904, Du Bois was asked to write a short ‘self-review’ for the prominent journal The Independent, in which he offered a frank evaluation of his accomplishment, especially with regard to its formal coherence and the diversity of its elements.]

One who is born with a cause is predestined to a certain narrowness of view, and at the same time to some clearness of vision within his limits with which the world often finds it well to reckon. My book has many of the defects and some of the advantages of this situation. Because I am a negro I lose something of that breadth of view which the more cosmopolitan races have, and with this goes an intensity of feeling and conviction which both wins and repels sympathy, and now enlightens, now puzzles.

The Souls of Black Folk is a series of fourteen essays written under various circumstances and for different purposes during a period of seven years. It has, therefore, considerable, perhaps too great, diversity. There are bits of history and biography, some description of scenes and persons, something of controversy and criticism, some statistics and a bit of story- telling. All this leads to rather abrupt transitions of style, tone and view- point and, too, without doubt, to a distinct sense of incompleteness and sketchiness.

On the other hand, there is a unity in the book, not simply the general unity of the larger topic, but a unity of purpose in the distinctively subject- ive note that runs in each essay. Through all the book runs a personal and intimate tone of self-revelation. In each essay I sought to speak from within –– to depict a world as we see it who dwell therein. In thus giving up the usual impersonal and judicial attitude of the traditional author I have lost in authority but gained in vividness. The reader will, I am sure, feel in reading my words peculiar warrant for setting his judgments against mine, but at the same time some revelation of how the world looks to me cannot easily escape him.

This is not saying that the style and workmanship of the book make its meaning altogether clear. A clear central message it has conveyed to most readers, I think, but around this center there has lain a penumbra of vagueness and half-veiled allusion which has made these and others espe- cially impatient. How far this fault is in me and how far it is in the nature of the message I am not sure. It is difficult, strangely difficult, to translateC

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the finer feelings of men into words. The Thing itself sits clear before you; but when you have dressed it out in periods it seems fearfully uncouth and inchoate. Nevertheless, as the feeling is deep the greater the impelling force to seek to express it. And here the feeling was deep.

In its larger aspects the style is tropical –– African. This needs no apol- ogy. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting accomplishment is a matter of taste. Sometimes I think very well of it and sometimes I do not.

‘The Souls of the Black Folk’, The Independent vol. 57, no. 2920 (17 Nov. 1904)

[In 1953, Blue Heron Press in New York published a Fiftieth Anniversary Jubilee Edition of The Souls of the Black Folk. Du Bois wrote a new preface specifically for the new edition, reflecting upon the circumstances of the book’s original publication, its enduring significance, and some of what he considered to be its limitations.]

Late in the Nineteenth Century, there developed in Chicago a movement to build a literary and publishing center in the Mid-West. The Brownes, father and son, editors for A. C. McClurg & Company, began looking about for young and unknown authors. I had just published my first two books: a history of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade to America, which appeared as the first volume of the new Harvard Historical Studies in 1896. My Philadelphia Negro was published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1899. I had also written a few essays which had been accepted by the Atlantic Monthly, the Dial and some other periodicals.

The McClurg editors wrote me about 1900, asking if I did not have material for a book which they could consider. I was at the time just embarking at Atlanta University on what I hoped to make my life work; it was to be a broad and exhaustive study of the Negro Problem in the United States. I outlined this project to the editors, but they naturally wanted something more limited and aimed at a popular audience. I there- fore undertook to assemble some of my published and unpublished essays, adding a few new ones.

They liked the proposed book and offered publication. I hesitated because I was sure that with more time and thought I could do a better job; in so many respects this was incomplete and unsatisfactory. But finally I plucked up courage and sent the manuscript off, and fifty years ago, t h e s o u l s o f b lac k f o l k appeared. It was well received and for the next generation it ran into a number of editions.

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Several times I planned to revise the book and bring it abreast of my own thought and to answer criticism. But I hesitated and finally decided to leave the book as first printed, as a monument to what I thought and felt in 1903. I hoped in other books to set down changes of fact and reaction.

In the present Jubilee Edition I have clung to this decision, and my thoughts of fifty years ago appear again as then written. Only in a few cases have I made less than a half-dozen alterations in word or phrase and then not to change my thought as previously set down but to avoid any possible misunderstanding today of what I meant to say yesterday.

As I re-read these messages of half a century ago, I sense two matters which are not so much omission on my part as indications of what I then did not know or did not realize: one is the influence of Freud and his co- workers in their study of psychology; the other is the tremendous impact on the modern world of Karl Marx.

As a student of James, Santayana and Royce, I was not unprepared for the revolution in psychology which the Twentieth Century has brought; but t h e s o u l s o f b lac k f o l k does not adequately allow for unconscious thought and the cake of custom in the growth and influence of race prejudice.

My college training did not altogether omit Karl Marx. He was men- tioned at Harvard and taken into account in Berlin. It was not omission but lack of proper emphasis or comprehension among my teachers of the revolution in thought and action which Marx meant. So perhaps I might end this retrospect simply by saying: I still think today as yesterday that the color-line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

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E X P L A NAT O RY N O T E S

2 [dedication]: the book is dedicated to Du Bois’s children, Burghardt Gomer (born on 2 October 1897) and Nina Yolande (born on 21 October 1900). Du Bois describes his son as ‘the Lost’ in an allusion to Burghardt’s death from diphtheria on 24 May 1899 in Atlanta. This tragic event is the subject of Chapter XI, ‘Of the Passing of the First-Born’.

7 Arthur Symons: the epigraph is drawn from The Crying of Waters (1903) by Arthur Symons. The music which follows is an excerpt of the traditional Negro spiritual, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. The scholar Eric Sundquist has pointed out that Du Bois, in choosing the musical selections that precede each chapter, made use of transcrip- tions (sometimes with slight variations) from two important nineteenth- century collections of spirituals: J. B. T. Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers with their Songs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1872); M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and its Students, arranged by Thomas P. Fenner (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874). See Sundquist, ‘Swing Low: The Souls of Black Folk’, in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 457–539.

Mechanicsville: the location in Virginia of a crucial Civil War battle (also known as the battle of Beaver Dam Creek) of June 1862.

8 born with a veil . . . second-sight: in African American folk culture, it is believed that children born with a caul (a membrane from the placenta covering the infant’s face at birth) are gifted with prophetic and psychic abilities.

10 ‘Shout, O children! . . . liberty!’: the refrain of the Negro spiritual ‘Shout, O Children!’

‘Take any shape . . . tremble!’: from Shakespeare, Macbeth, i i i. iv. 102–3.

11 revolution of 1876: the results of the presidential elections of 1876 were contested by three states, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, which supported the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden over the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Some Southern Democrats threatened to secede from the Union. The Hayes-Tilden compromise resolved the dispute: Hayes was named the president, and the North agreed not to interfere further in the status of the freedmen, effectively ending the period of Reconstruction.

12 Toussaint: Toussaint L’Ouverture (1746–1803), the leader of the Haitian Revolution, in which the slave population overthrew French rule and defeated the army of Napoleon.

15 Lowell: the epigraph is taken from The Present Crisis (1844), by James

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Russell Lowell. The music which follows is an excerpt of the Negro spiritual, ‘My Lord, What a Mourning’.

15 The problem . . . color-line: this phrase, which also appears in the opening paragraph of the ‘Forethought’, was first used by Du Bois in his closing speech ‘To the Nations of the World’ at the Pan-African Conference held in July 1900 in London.

16 War Amendments: three amendments associated with the Civil War: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery and emancipated the slaves; the Fourteenth Amendment (1866) provided former slaves ‘equal protection under the law’; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave black males the right to vote. Freedmen’s Bureau: the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established by the US government in 1865 to protect the rights of freed slaves in the South. It helped to build Negro hospitals and schools, set up courts, and assisted in labour negotiations between former slaves and Southern businessmen and farmers. The Bureau was dissolved in 1872. Ben Butler: from Massachusetts, Benjamin F. Butler (1818–93) was a politician and Union general in the Civil War. Fremont: John C. Fremont (1813–80), Civil War general and presidential candidate in 1956. Halleck: Henry H. Halleck (1815–72), Civil War general. Secretary Cameron: Simon L. Cameron (1799–1889), who served as secretary of war under President Lincoln.

17 Pierce of Boston: Edward Lillie Pierce (1829–97), abolitionist from Boston, who went to the South in the service of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Secretary Chase . . . Port Royal experiment: Salmon P. Chase (1808–73), who served as secretary of the treasury during the Civil War, appointed Pierce to direct a federal effort in 1861 at Port Royal, South Carolina, to hire freed slaves as paid labourers in the cotton industry there. The enterprise was successful, but the land was given back to its white former owners after the conclusion of the war. Amistad: a slave ship taken over by African captives near Cuba in June 1839. The Africans demanded to be returned to Africa, but the surviving crew members instead sailed the ship to Connecticut. Imprisoned for two years, the Africans were finally freed and returned to Africa with the help of abolitionist lawyers (including John Quincy Adams) who argued the case before the Supreme Court.

18 General Dix: John A. Dix (1798–1879), Civil War general who was in charge of freedmen’s affairs. General Banks: Nathaniel P. Banks (1816–94), Civil War general. Colonel Eaton: John Eaton, Jr. (1829–?), Union officer. General Saxton: Rufus Saxton, Jr. (1824–1908), Civil War general.

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19 ‘Field-order Number Fifteen’: this order, issued by General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–91) in the summer of 1865, granted freed slaves the right to farm land from Charlestown, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. In the fall of the same year, the order was counter- manded by President Andrew Johnson, who ordered that the land be returned to its former white owners. Fessenden . . . General Howard: William Pitt Fessenden served as sec- retary of the treasury in 1864–5. Oliver Otis Howard (1830–1909) served as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865.

23 crusade of the New England school-ma’am: a reference to the teachers and missionaries, mainly middle-class white women, who went to work in the South under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The annals of this Ninth Crusade . . . seemed to his: there were eight European Christian crusades to the Holy Land; the seventh was led in 1248 by Louis IX of France. Du Bois terms the ‘crusade of the New England schoolma’am’ a ‘Ninth Crusade’ in an allusion both to the project’s evangelical tenor and to its extraordinary ambition.

26 toto cælo: (Latin) totally, absolutely; literally, ‘by all of heaven’. 27 Edmund Ware . . . Cravath: Ware (1837–85) served as the superintendent

of the Atlanta school system after the Civil War, and later helped found Atlanta University, of which he was the first president. Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–93) was a Union officer in the Civil War who served as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau; in 1868 he was a founder of the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute. Erastus Milo Cravath (1833– 1900) was an abolitionist clergyman who assisted in the founding of Atlanta University and Fisk University, of which he was elected president in 1875. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton: black colleges founded in the decade after the Civil War: Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia (founded 1868); Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (founded 1866); Atlanta University (founded 1865); and Howard University in Washington, DC (founded 1867).

32 the King’s Highway: a phrase used in Numbers 20: 17 and 21: 22 to refer to the main road across Jordan that the people of Israel were not allowed to use during their time of wandering.

33 Byron: the epigraph is taken from Canto 2 of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). The music which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘A Great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land’. Booker T. Washington: a former slave, Washington (1856–1915) founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881, and became a highly influential educator and lecturer. He was Du Bois’s greatest rival as a Negro leader at the beginning of the twentieth century.

34 ‘Atlanta Compromise’: the speech delivered by Washington at the Cotton States Exposition on 18 September 1895.

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34 Jefferson Davis: southern politician (1808–89) who served as the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Davis was the subject of Du Bois’s commencement address upon his graduation from Harvard in 1890.

French grammar: in his autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), Washington expresses dismay when he comes across a young black boy who is attempting to learn French while living in poverty, with ‘filth all around him’.

37 the terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono: references to historical slave rebellions. Cato was the leader of a slave revolt in 1739 at the Stono river in South Carolina. The maroons were groups of escaped slaves who established clandestine, self-sufficient communities through- out the Caribbean and South America. Slaves took control of the island of St John in the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) for six months in 1723.

earnest songs of Phyllis . . . demands of the Cuffes: Phillis Wheatley (c.1753–84) was born in West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave in 1761. Her masters, John and Susannah Wheatley, supported her education, and she became an avid reader of Latin and English litera- ture. In 1773 she travelled to London and published there a collection of her verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Crispus Attucks (1723–70), a former slave, was the first man to fall at the Boston Massacre in 1770. The former slave Peter Salem (1750–1816) and the free black Salem Poor (1758–?) were both soldiers in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Born to free parents in Philadelphia, Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) was a self-taught scientist, mathe- matician, and astronomer. He was best known for the yearly farmer’s almanacs he compiled, and for the open letter he wrote to President Jefferson. Born in slavery, James C. Derham (c.1762–?) was educated in medicine by his master, and subsequently purchased his freedom by working as a physician. Paul Cuffe (1759–1817), who was born in Massachusetts to a manumitted slave father and an American Indian mother, became a black ship captain and merchant in New Bedford. He successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to grant black and American Indian men the right to vote. An advocate of the emigration of the African American population to Africa, he led a small expedition of settlers to Sierra Leone in 1815.

under Gabriel in Virginia . . . Nat Turner: Du Bois is referring to three famous slave revolts, led by Gabriel Prosser (?–1800) in Richmond, Virginia; Denmark Vesey (?–1822) in Charleston, South Carolina; and Nat Turner (1800–31) in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.

African Church: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1787.

Walker’s wild appeal: born to a slave father and a free black mother in Wilmington, North Carolina, David Walker (1785–1830) grew up in

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freedom and later settled in Boston, where he achieved fame as a writer and abolitionist. His Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) was a militant and eloquent call for blacks to revolt against slavery. He died under mysterious circumstances in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Forten . . . Barbadoes of Boston: James Forten, Sr. (1766–1842) was a black Revolutionary War veteran and advocate of African emigration who became a wealthy sail maker in Philadelphia. Robert Purvis, Sr. (1810–98) was a prominent abolitionist in Philadelphia who was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Mary Ann Shad (or Shadd) (1823–93) lived in Canada for twelve years, and edited the newspaper Provincial Freemen. Alexander Du Bois (1803–88) was Du Bois’s paternal grandfather. The Bostonian James G. Barbadoes (c.1796–1841) was a co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

38 Remond . . . and Douglass: born in Salem, Massachusetts, Charles Lenox Remond (1810–74) was an abolitionist journalist and lecturer. William Cooper Nell (1816–74) was an abolitionist in Boston and the author of Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). Born in slavery, William Wells Brown (c.1814–84) escaped in 1834, and wrote a well- known narrative describing his escape, as well as a novel, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853). Frederick Douglass (c.1818–95) was an escaped slave who became a prominent orator and editor in the abolition- ist movement. He taught himself to read and write while a slave in Maryland, and upon his escape wrote his famous Narrative (1845).

John Brown’s raid: in October 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown led a small group in a violent and ultimately unsuccessful attack on the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, aiming to capture its weapons in order to liberate and arm the slaves in the area. Du Bois would publish a biography of Brown in 1909.

Elliot . . . Daniel Payne: Robert Brown Elliot (1842–84), a black printer and lawyer born and raised in Liverpool, England, moved to the United States in 1867. He was editor of the Leader in Charleston, South Carolina, and later served as a representative in Congress during Reconstruction. An escaped slave, Blanche K. Bruce (1841–98) was the first black US senator from Mississippi, serving from 1875 to 1881. John Mercer Langston (1829–97) was a black lawyer who became an important academic administrator as the dean of the Law School at Howard University and later the president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. He later served as a diplomat in the Dominican Republic, and from 1890 to 1892 was elected to the US Congress as a representative from Virginia. For Alexander Crummell, see the note to p. 145 below. Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–93) was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a founder of Wilberforce College, where he served as president for sixteen years.

Revolution of 1876: see the note to p. 11 above.

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38 Price arose as a new leader: born to a slave father and a free mother, Joseph C. Price (1854–93) was an educator and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

40 the Grimkes . . . Bowen: Archibald H. Grimké (1849–1930) was a lawyer, editor, and civil rights leader, and his brother Francis J. Grimké (1850– 1937) was a priest and writer. A longtime sociology professor and dean at Howard University, Kelly Miller (1863–1939) was also a prominent civil rights commentator and journalist. The Methodist minister, lecturer, and philosophy professor John Wesley Edward Bowen (1855–1933) was the second African American to earn a Ph.D.

43 Governor Aycock . . . Tillman: the educational reformer Charles Brantley Aycock (1859–1912) was governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905. White supremacist John Tyler Morgan (1824–1907) was a US senator representing Alabama from 1876 until 1907. Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) was a white supremacist novelist and essayist and an apolo- gist for slavery. The extremist white supremacist Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847–1918) served as governor of South Carolina from 1890 until 1894 and US senator representing South Carolina from 1894 until 1918.

44 ‘We hold these truths . . . happiness’: from the American Declaration of Independence.

45 Schiller: the verse is taken from Friedrich von Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans [The Maid of Orleans] (1801), i v. i. The speaker in the text is Joan of Arc: ‘If you wish to proclaim your power, | Choose those who stand free of sins, | In your eternal house! | Send out your angels! | The immortal, the pure ones, | Who are unsentimental and do not weep! | Do not choose a delicate maiden, | Not the tender soul of the shepherd- ess!’ The music which follows is an excerpt of the Negro spiritual ‘My Way’s Cloudy’.

48 worked Colonel Wheeler’s farm on shares: in the sharecropping system, the tenant farmer was obliged to give a portion of his or her yearly crop yield as ‘rent’ to the landowner. The system was regularly abused: it was not uncommon for sharecroppers to be forced to give up as much as half their crops, as they were charged not only for ‘rent’, but also for the inflated cost of other necessities and supplies. Despite its inequities, the system was common after the Civil War because so few blacks had property or access to capital for cash rent payments. Cicero ‘pro Archia Poeta’: an oration in defence of the poet Archias, in which Cicero offers a forceful argument for the contribution of art to society.

53 Jim Crow car: a segregated train compartment for black passengers. The term originated around 1830 when Thomas Rice, a white performer who blackened his face with burnt cork, gained fame singing a song called ‘Jump Jim Crow’. Extrapolated into a stereotype of black inferiority, ‘Jim Crow’ became a fixture of minstrel shows in the United States, in which white performers staged grotesque and racist caricatures of black

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Southern life. The term came more broadly to refer to legal segregation during the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the integration efforts of the Reconstruction era were abandoned and many states in the South adopted laws enforcing the separation of the races in public spaces. Segregated train travel is mentioned again in Chapter VII, ‘Of the Black Belt’, in the famous paragraph where Du Bois ushers his reader into the black world of the rural South: ‘If you wish to ride with me you must come into the “Jim Crow Car.” . . . Of course this car is not so good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder –– and in mine’ (pp. 78–9).

54 Whittier: the epigraph is the sixth stanza of Howard at Atlanta (1869), by John Greenleaf Whittier. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘The Rocks and Mountains’. réclame: (French) renown, acclaim; an appetite for publicity.

55 Bœotia: the Greek province that was home to Atalanta. Atalanta: in Greek mythology, the beautiful huntress who promised to marry the man who could outrun her. She was finally defeated by Hippomenes, who tricked her by dropping three golden apples that she stopped to pick up. Bourse: (French) the Parisian stock exchange. Third Estate: European feudal society was considered to be divided into three stratifications or ‘estates’: the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility), and the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie).

56 parvenu: (French) one who has achieved financial success but who lacks the social graces of his acquired standing.

58 Mammonism: the immoral or unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. trivium and quadrivium: in the structure of the medieval university in Europe, the trivium (which includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric) is the lower group of the seven liberal arts. The quadrivium (which includes arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) is the upper division.

59 ‘Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren’: (German) ‘Renounce shalt thou, thou shalt renounce.’ From Faust (1808) by Goethe. from Academus to Cambridge: Academus was the school founded by Plato in 387 b c. Cambridge University is an elite university in England.

63 (Fitzgerald): the epigraph comes from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), the works of the Persian poet Khayyam (who lived c.1000 c e) translated by Edward FitzGerald. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘March On’. tertium quid: (Latin) third state, something of ambiguous status; literally ‘third something’.

65 Dr. Johnson: the English lexicographer, poet, and essayist Samuel Johnson (1709–84), best known for his path-breaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

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69 Spelman Seminary: founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and renamed in 1884, Spelman was the first college in the United States for African American women.

70 Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard . . . Shaw: a list of some of the most prominent Negro institutions of higher education founded after the Civil War: Atlanta University, established in Atlanta 1865; Fisk University was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1866; Howard University was founded in Washington, DC, in 1867; Wilberforce University was founded in Ohio by the AME Church in 1856; Lincoln University was founded in Oxford, Pennsylvania, in 1854 under the name the Ashmun Institute (it became Lincoln University in 1866); Biddle Memorial Institute was established in Charlotte, North Carolina, by the Presbyterian Church in 1867 (it would be renamed Johnson C. Smith University in 1921); Shaw University was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865. f o r m e r t e ac h e r a n d f r i e n d: Edmund Asa Ware (1837–85), a founder and the first president of Atlanta University.

71 the Conference at Atlanta University: while a faculty member in the sociology department at Atlanta University, Du Bois organized a series of conferences and publications concerning African American life. ‘The College-Bred Negro’ was the fifth conference, held in 1900.

72 gaucherie: (French) haplessness, lack of grace. the energetic wife of the principal: Margaret Murray Washington, the African American activist and intellectual who had been a classmate of Du Bois’s at Fisk; she was Booker T. Washington’s third wife.

74 this Talented Tenth: Du Bois’s term for the educated African American professional elite, which he argued had a responsibility to lead and better the condition of the black masses. See the essay ‘The Talented Tenth’ included as Appendix II to this volume.

76 Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite: Pisgah is the name of the mountain east of Jordan from which Moses first saw the Promised Land. The Philistines and the Amalekites were enemies of the Israelites during their travels as they searched for the Promised Land.

77 The Song of Solomon: the first epigraph is taken from Song of Solomon 1: 5–6. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro Spiritual ‘Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard’. Hernando de Soto: a reference to the Spanish explorer (1496?–1542) and discoverer of the Mississippi river. Sam Hose: a farm labourer who was accused of killing his employer in Palmetto, Georgia, a town outside Atlanta. When captured by a mob, he was also accused of raping the employer’s wife; Hose confessed to the killing, after an argument over a debt, but denied having committed rape. He was publicly tortured and killed in April 1899 in a lynching observed by more than 2,000 people. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, was deeply affected by the episode. While on his way to

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deliver a letter protesting the lynching to the editorial office of the Atlanta Constitution, Du Bois was horrified to learn that Hose had been barbecued and dismembered; his burnt knuckles were on display in a store window downtown. In his 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois wrote that the episode taught him that ‘one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved’.

78 Oglethorpe: James Edward Oglethorpe (1696–1785) was the founder of the colony of Georgia in 1733.

prayers of Whitefield: the English evangelist preacher George Whitefield (1714–70), visiting the colony of Georgia in 1738, offered a biblical justification of slavery and supported the expansion of the trade.

Delegal riots: a reference to the events of 23 August 1899 in Darien, Georgia, when hundreds of blacks prevented a lynching by blocking the removal of a black prisoner from jail. Twenty-one men were convicted of ‘insurrection’ for their participation in the confrontation and sentenced to a year’s sentence on a convict farm.

Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezea: Scottish immigrants had settled in Georgia as early as the eighteenth century. The Moravians were a denomination of the Protestant Church who had suffered per- secution in Europe before emigrating to the United States; they founded two communities near Savannah, Georgia: Ebenezer (1734) and New Ebenezer (1736).

Haytian Terror of Toussaint: see the note to p. 12 above. national statute of 1808: an act of Congress passed in 1807 to prohibit the importation of slaves into the United States after 1 January 1808.

81 rack-rent: excessive or exorbitant rent. 93 William Vaughn Moody: the text is taken from The Brute (1901), by

William Vaughn Moody. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘Children You’ll Be Called On’.

Jason and his Argonauts: Du Bois is alluding to the Greek myth of Jason, the prince who was deceived of his kingdom. Jason went on a quest with his companions, the Argonauts, to prove himself worthy of the throne by acquiring the Golden Fleece of Chrysomallus, the flying ram. Du Bois is suggesting a parallel between Jason’s quest and the contemporary quest for cotton in the American South.

104 migration-agent laws: state laws intended to limit the mobility of farm workers; the laws prohibited employment agents from attempting to get black labourers to move to other states.

105 Aunt Ophelia’s word: Ophelia St Clare, a character in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

108 Arthur Young: English writer (1741–1820), author of Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (1792).

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111 Mrs. Browning: the text is taken from A Vision of Poets (1844) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘I’m A Rolling’.

112 tertium quid: see note to p. 63 above. 121 ipso facto: (Latin) by the state of affairs; literally ‘by the fact itself ’. 126 Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose: Phillis Wheatley (c.1753–84) published a

book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), while still a slave; see the note to p. 37 above. Sam Hose was the victim of a lynching in 1899 in Palmetto, Georgia; see the note to p. 77 above.

127 ‘That mind and soul . . . vaster’: these verses are taken from the prologue to In Memoriam (1850) by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

128 Fiona MacLeod: the epigraph is taken from ‘Dim Face of Beauty’ by William Sharp, writing under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘Steal Away Home’.

130 Delphi and Endor: Delphi was the location of the ancient Greek temple of Apollo. Endor is the name of the medium who, in 1 Samuel 28: 7–14, communicates with the ghost of Samuel.

131 the Bethel of Philadelphia: the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1794 by Richard Allen, was the first urban black church in the United States.

133 the great African Methodist Church . . . Colored Methodist: the African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in Philadelphia in 1787; the Zion Church was an evangelical faction that broke away from the AME Church to found the African Methodist Zion Church; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1870.

134 the mysterious Obi worship: a religious practice of African heritage (also known as ‘obeah’ in Jamaica).

fierce Maroons, the Danish blacks: see the note to p. 37 above. 135 ‘Children, we all . . . appear!’: lines from the Negro spiritual ‘Children,

We All Shall Be Free’.

‘Uncle Tom’: a reference to the character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). ‘O Freedom . . . be free’: lines from the Negro spiritual ‘O Freedom’.

139 Dum vivimus, vivamus: (Latin) ‘While we live, let us live.’ 140 Swinburne: the verse comes from Itylus (1866), by Algernon Charles

Swinburne. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘I Hope My Mother Will Be There’.

‘Unto you a child is born’: a reformulation of the prophecy of the Messiah’s arrival in Isaiah 9: 6: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given’.

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And I thought in awe of her . . . underneath her heart: Nina Gomer Du Bois was Du Bois’s first wife. They married on 12 May 1896, and on 2 October 1897 Nina gave birth to their first child, Burghardt Gomer Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. On 24 May 1899, Burghardt died of diphtheria in Atlanta. Du Bois tried unsuccessfully to find a black physician to treat Burghardt; white physicians and hospitals refused to treat black patients during this period.

144 Thou shalt forego!: Du Bois’s translation of Goethe’s phrase ‘sollst entbehren’; see the note to p. 59 above.

145 Tennyson: the epigraph is taken from ‘The Passing of Arthur’ in Idylls of the King (1869) by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. Alexander Crummell: the great African American clergyman, essayist, African missionary, and abolitionist (1819–98). He was ordained a deacon in St Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Philadelphia in 1842; in 1844 he became a priest at St Paul’s church. In 1848 he went to England to study at Cambridge University. He then travelled to Africa and lived in Liberia as a missionary between 1853 and 1872, when he returned to the United States.

146 Missouri Compromise . . . Manila and El Caney: the Missouri Comprom- ise, passed by Congress in 1820, retained the equal distribution of free and slave states in the Union by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Manila and El Caney are the locations in the Philippines and in Cuba of important American victories during the Spanish-American War. Beriah Green: the founder of the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, from which Crummell graduated in 1836. Once before . . . middle of the swamp: Crummell had enrolled with two other African Americans (Henry Highland Garnet and Thomas S. Sidney) in the Noyes Academy, founded by abolitionists in Canaan, New Hampshire. Incensed at their admission, a mob of white men used oxen to drag the Academy’s main building into a swamp; Crummell and his friends were forced to leave.

147 ‘It is all very natural . . . cannot admit a Negro’: Benjamin T. Onderdonk, Episcopal bishop of New York, refused Crummell admission to the Episcopal General Theological Seminar in 1838.

148 John Jay: politician and abolitionist (1817–94), grandson of John Jay, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

149 ‘why cast your pearls before swine?’: from Matthew 7: 6. Bishop Onderdonk: Henry U. Onderdonk of Philadelphia, the brother of Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk of New York.

150 Fox’s ‘Lives of the Martyrs’ . . . ‘Whole Duty of Man’: a reference to the Book of Martyrs (1563) by the English clergyman John Foxe (1516–78).

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‘The Whole Duty of Man’ was a devotional text published anonymously in 1658.

150 ‘. . . bear the whips . . . unworthy takes’: Shakespeare, Hamlet, i i i . i. 72–6. 152 those heart-wrung talents: Du Bois is alluding the Parable of the Talents,

recounted in Matthew 25: 21. 153 Mrs. Browning: the epigraph comes from A Romance of the Ganges (1838)

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The musical excerpt which follows comes from the Negro spiritual ‘I’ll Hear the Trumpet Sound’, also known under the title ‘You May Bury Me in the East’.

158 the music of Lohengrin’s swan: the prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1850).

159 ‘I will go in . . . I perish’: from Esther 4: 16. 166 ‘Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin’: the opening line of the lyrics to the ‘Wedding

March’ in Wagner’s Lohengrin: ‘Joyfully led, pass along to that place.’ Du Bois has changed the word treulich (faithfully) in the original libretto to freudig (joyfully).

167 Negro Song: the verse comes from the Negro spiritual ‘Lay This Body Down’. The musical excerpt is taken from the spiritual ‘Wrestlin’ Jacob’. Jubilee Hall: a building at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, constructed with the funds earned by the Fisk Jubilee Singers during their international concert tour of Negro spirituals.

168 Port Royal experiment: see the note to p. 17 above. Thomas Wentworth Higginson . . . Miss McKim: Higginson (1823–1911) wrote extensively of black spirituals and folk songs in his Army Life in a Southern Regiment (1870). Lucy McKim Garrison (1842–77) was a musician and a collector of black folk songs in South Carolina during the Civil War. Fisk Jubilee Singers: the famous chorus, originally with eleven members, was established at Fisk University in 1867. They toured the United States and went to Europe in 1873, and their fundraising helped to sustain the University.

170 knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean: David Levering Lewis, in the first volume of his monumental biography of Du Bois, has suggested that the lyrics may be related to a Senegambian song of cap- tivity, whose lyrics can be translated as follows: ‘I have fallen into a pit, get me out. Get me out! | I have fallen into a pit, get me out. Get me out! | One circumcised boy, one circumcised boy, one circumcised boy.’ See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 585 n. 7. ‘You may bury me in the East . . . in that morning’: lyrics from the Negro spiritual ‘I’ll Hear the Trumpet Sound’, also known under the title ‘You May Bury Me in the East’, which provided the musical epigraph to Chapter XIII.

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171 ‘Swanee River’ and ‘Old Black Joe’: two popular songs written by Stephen Foster (1826–64).

172 ‘My Lord calls me . . . my soul’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Steal Away’. ‘Dere’s no rain . . . to go home’: from the Negro spiritual ‘There’s No Rain to Wet You’. ‘O Lord, keep me from sinking down’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Keep Me from Sinking Down’. ‘Jesus is dead and God’s gone away’: from the Negro spiritual ‘My Soul Wants Something That’s New’.

173 ‘Yonder’s my ole mudder . . . bime-by’: from the Negro spiritual ‘O’er the Crossing’. ‘Poor Rosy, poor gal . . . my home’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Poor Rosy’. ‘Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net’: from the German folk song ‘Jetzt gang I ans Brunnele’: ‘Now I’m going to the well, but I shall not drink’.

174 ‘Dust, dust . . . spirit home’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Dust and Ashes’. ‘There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart’: from the Negro spiritual ‘There’s a Little Wheel a-Turnin’ ’. ‘Oh, the stars . . . of the Lord’: from the Negro spiritual ‘My Lord, What a Mourning!’ ‘Michael, haul the boat ashore . . . you and me’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’.

175 Before the Pilgrims landed: the first Africans were brought in captivity to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619; the pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, in 1620.

176 ‘Let us cheer the weary traveller . . . heavenly way’: from the Negro spiritual ‘Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveler’.

Appendix I: The Conservation of Races

181 nous avons changer tout cela: (French) a slightly incorrect version of nous avons changé tout cela (‘we have changed all that’). Zamboes of America: peoples of mixed-race descent.

182 ‘one far off Divine event’: from stanza xxxvi in the Conclusion of Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850).

183 Toussaint, the Saviour: see note to p. 12 above. 187 with Garrison: William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79), the prominent

abolitionist and editor of The Liberator. The quote is taken from his ‘Salutatory Address’, The Liberator (1 January 1831). Burst his birth’s . . . his evil star: a slightly altered version of lines from Tennyson, In Memoriam, lxiv. The first line in the original reads: ‘Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar’. In lines 2–4, the verbs have been changed from the original’s ‘grasps’, ‘breasts’, and ‘grapples’.

Explanatory Notes 221

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Appendix II: The Talented Tenth

190 Phillis . . . Banneker: see note to p. 37 above. James Derham . . . Lemuel Haynes: Born in slavery, James C. Derham (c.1762–?) was educated in medicine by his master, and subsequently purchased his freedom by working as a physician. Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) was a mixed-race man from Connecticut who fought in the Revolutionary War; he was the first African American to be ordained in a mainstream Protestant denomination, the Congregational Church.

191 Ira Aldridge: raised in New York City, Aldridge (1807–67) achieved great fame as an actor in London in the 1820s, and toured Europe extensively. David Walker: see note to p. 37 above. that first Negro convention: with delegates from New York, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the first National Negro Conven- tion was held in Philadelphia from 20 to 24 September 1831. Purvis and Remond . . . Douglass: for Robert Purvis, Sr. and Charles Lenox Remond, see notes to pp. 37 and 38 above. James W. C. Pennington (1807–70) was a former slave and the author of the narra- tive The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849). Born a slave in Maryland, Henry Highland Garnet (1815–82) became an important abolitionist orator and editor. For Alexander Crummell, see note to p. 145 above. For Frederick Douglass, see note to p. 38 above.

192 Maria Weston Chapman: the Boston-based Chapman (1806–85) was an abolitionist editor and associate of William Lloyd Garrison. McCune Smith: brought up free in New York City, James McCune Smith (1813–65) became a prominent lawyer, scholar, and anti-slavery advocate. Russworm . . . Benezet: ‘Russworm’ is a misspelling of the last name of John Brown Russwurm (1799–1851), the Jamaican editor and abolitionist who was educated in Canada and at Bowdoin College in Maine. Before studying at Bowdoin, he taught at the Smith School in Boston, which had been founded by Dartmouth alumni. Russwurm edited Freedom’s Journal in New York before emigrating to Liberia in 1829. Elias Nau (?–1722) was a French evangelist minister who moved to New York and taught at Trinity Church in New York City. The French Quaker educator Anthony Benezet (1713–84) founded a school for blacks in Philadelphia. Langston . . . Payne: for Langston, Bruce, Elliot, and Payne, see note to p. 38 above. Daniel Hale Williams (1856–1931) founded Chicago Provi- dent Hospital, the first with an integrated staff. He was the first surgeon to perform a successful heart operation. The first African American to graduate from Harvard, Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a diplomat, teacher, and lawyer.

195 As early . . . Bowdoin College: John Brown Russwurm; see note to p. 192 above.

199 Mark Hopkins: born in Henderson, New York, Hopkins (1813–78)

Explanatory Notes222

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served as the treasurer of the Central Pacific Rail Road Company, which built the first transcontinental railroad.

202 Atticus G. Haygood: born in Georgia, Haygood (1839–96) served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He was the author of Our Brother in Black, His Freedom and His Future (1881).

Explanatory Notes 223

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