Gates Henry Louis Jr. - Black Folk Then and Now

the slave master had a direct interest in discrediting the personality of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested had a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery. Having made him the companion of horses and mules, he naturally sought to justify himself by assuming that the negro was not much better than a mule. The holders of twenty hundred million dollars worth of property in human chattels procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and have made us odious in the eyes of the world. Slavery had the power at one time to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, and dictate the policy, set the fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too high as they set the manhood of the negro too low. Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions to-day.... The office of color in the color line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects of oppression, insult, and persecution. It is not the maddening liquor, but the black letters on the sign telling the world where it may be had ... Slavery, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, The Color Line, 1881.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (18681963) was the most prolific and, arguably, the most influential African American writer of his generation. The novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson (18711938) once noted the no single work had informed the shape of the African American literary tradition, except perhaps Uncle Toms Cabin, than had Du Boiss seminal collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903). While trained as a sociologist at Berlin and as a historian at Harvard, Du Bois was fearless in the face of genreeven when some of the genres that he sought to embrace did not fully embrace him in return. Du Bois published twenty-two single-author works, twenty-one in his lifetime (his Autobiography, edited by his friend and literary executor, Herbert Aptheker, would not be published until 1968). A selection of his greatest works, An ABC of Color: Selections from over a Half Century of the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, appeared in 1963, the year he died. And while these books reflect a wide variety of genresincluding three widely heralded and magisterial books of essays published in 1903, 1920, and 1940 (The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept), one biography, five novels, a pioneering sociological study of a black community, five books devoted to the history of Africa, three historical studies of African American people, among othersDu Bois was, in the end, an essayist, an essayist of the first order, one of the masters of that protean form that so attracted Du Boiss only true antecedent, Frederick Douglass (18181895) as well as Du Boiss heir in the history of the form, James Baldwin (19241987). (Baldwin, like Du Bois, would turn repeatedly to fiction, only to render the form as an essay.)

Du Bois, clearly, saw himself as a man of action, but a man of action who luxuriated within a verdant and fecund tropical rainforest of words. It is not Du Boiss intoxication with words that marks his place in the history of great black public intellectualspersons of letters for whom words are a vehicle for political action and their own participation in political movements. After all, one need only recall Du Boiss predecessor, Frederick Douglass, or another of his disciples, Martin Luther King Jr. for models in the African American tradition of leaders for whom acting and speaking were so inextricably intertwined as to be virtually coterminous; no, the novelty of Du Boiss place in the black tradition is that he wrote himself to a power, rather than spoke himself to power. Both Douglass and King, for all their considerable literary talents, will be remembered always for the power of their oratory, a breathtaking power exhibited by both. Du Bois, on the other hand, was not a great orator; he wrote like he talked, and he talked like an extraordinarily well-educated late Anglo-American Victorian, just as James Weldon Johnson did; no deep black stentorian resonances are to be found in the public speaking voices of either of these two marvelous writers. Booker T. Washington (18561915) spoke in a similar public voice.