Du Bois William Edward Burghardt - The souls of Black folk

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

W. E. B. DU BOIS was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on 23 February 1868. In 1885 he went to Fisk University where he edited the Fisk Herald. After graduating in June 1888 he continued his studies at Harvard College, gaining an MA degree in history in 1891. Following further study at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he returned to the United States in 1894 to take a teaching position in classics at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. Du Bois became the first black to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 and moved to Philadelphia the next year to pursue a sociological study of black life there. After accepting a faculty position in economics and history at Atlanta University, he gained renown as an intellectual in the next decade with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his participation in the Niagara Movement, a group of black leaders assembled in 1905 to promote full civil and economic rights for blacks. In 1910 Du Bois moved to New York, where he accepted a position at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as the editor of the civil rights organizations monthly journal, The Crisis. In February 1919 in Paris, Du Bois organized the First Pan-African Congress, which gathered delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. He continued to publish a steady stream of important books, including Darkwater (1920), Dark Princess (1928), and Black Reconstruction (1935). After a series of political conflicts, Du Bois resigned from The Crisis in 1934 and returned to Atlanta University, where he founded and edited another journal, Phylon. Increasingly radical in his public criticism of US foreign policy and race relations after the Second World War, Du Bois worked with pacifist organizations and the Council on African Affairs. After celebrating his ninetieth birthday in New York, Du Bois toured Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in 1958 and 1959. In 1961 he accepted the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of independent Ghana, to move to Africa. Du Bois died in Ghana on 27 August 1963, on the eve of the monumental civil rights protest march in Washington, DC.

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is an associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the co-editor of the essay collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and the editor of Joseph Conrads Nostromo (2004) and Frederick Douglasss My Bondage and My Freedom (2005).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

W. E. B. DU BOIS

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
BRENT HAYES EDWARDS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963.
The souls of Black folk / W. E. B. Du Bois ; edited with an
introduction and notes by Brent Hayes Edwards.
p. cm. (Oxford worlds classics paperback)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 9780192806789 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African Americans.
I. Edwards, Brent Hayes. II. Title.
E185.6.D797 2007
973.0496073dc22

ISBN 9780192806789

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
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SINCE its publication in April 1903, The Souls of Black Folk has justifiably been celebrated as the definitive text of the African American literary tradition. A seemingly modest collection of fourteen pieces framed by a preface and afterword, the book made an immediate impact on American political debate, erupting with the sudden brilliance of fireworks going off in a cemetery. It is one of the very rare books that marks the threshold of its historical era (the dawning of the Twentieth Century, to use Du Boiss phrase), both by articulating the political demands, cultural accomplishments, and spiritual strivings of an entire people, and at the same time by setting the definitive terms of debate for a national dialogue about the significance of race in the lingering aftermath of the slave trade.

By the time The Souls of Black Folk was published, Du Bois had already achieved recognition as one of the leading lights of the African American intellectual elite at the turn of the century. Born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he had studied at Fisk, the black college in Nashville, Tennessee, before pursuing a second BA and an MA degree at Harvard, where he worked with some of the most important scholars of the time, including Frank Taussig in economics, Albert Bushnell Hart in history, and William James and George Santayana in philosophy. Du Bois continued his graduate work on fellowship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, returning to the United States to become the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. During the next seven years, Du Bois held three teaching positions (at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University), and established himself as an energetic and gifted scholar with the publication of his doctoral thesis,