W. E. B. Du Bois - Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

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Copyright

Copyright 1999 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1999, contains the unabridged contents of Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil , originally published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. A new introduction has been specially prepared by Manning Marable for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 18681963.

Darkwater : voices from within the veil / W. E. B. Du Bois; with an introduction by Manning Marable.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

Includes bibliographical references.

9780486112022

I. Afro-Americans. 2. United StatesRace relations. I. Title. II. Series.

E185.61.D83 1999

305.896073dc21

9932231
CIP

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
40890604
www.doverpublications.com

AD NINAM
May 12, 1896

Introduction

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DU BOIS (18681963) was without question the most influential black intellectual in American history. In his extraordinary public career, Du Bois achieved prominence in the worlds of both scholarship and politics. Du Bois authored or edited more than thirty works. His ethnographic survey of black life, The Philadelphia Negro , established the field of urban sociology. Du Boiss Black Reconstruction , first published in 1935, presented a radical reinterpretation of the social and political struggles for democracy in the post-bellum South, from the vantage point of black Americans. In 1905, Du Bois co-founded the Niagara Movement, which challenged the accommodationist policies of conservative educator Booker T. Washington, contributing to the rise of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From 1910 to 1934, Du Bois was the editor of the NAACPs the Crisis, a monthly journal that functioned as the leading voice for civil rights. Du Boiss best known work, The Souls of Black Folk , which appeared in the spring of 1903, continues to influence generations of scholars who interpret African-American culture, religion, literature, and music.

The collection of essays that best represents Du Boiss ideas at the height of his political influence and intellectual maturity, however, is Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil . The subtitle of the book is closely allied to the central thesis of The Souls of Black Folk : double consciousness, that sense of paradox and tension which characterizes the black experience in a racist society. The African American is the permanent outsider in U. S. democracy, an oppressed member of the household perhaps, but never a member of the national family. I have been in the world, Du Bois reflected, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways.

One cannot read and understand Darkwater outside of its immediate historical context. The book was written during a period of tremendous social change. The triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November, 1917, had inspired the development of a small but militant Communist movement inside the United States. At the same time, several million white Americans during these years would join the Invisible Empire, the Ku Klux Klan, which became a powerful political force in state and local governments across the country. As a result, hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers and workers from the rural South were migrating to the urban North, creating new black communities such as Harlem. These neighborhoods would form the core constituencies of the nationalistic African-American protest groups, such as Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association, then being established. In addition, these turbulent social currents impacted Du Bois as an intellectual and as an important leader of opinion of an oppressed people.

Like Souls , Darkwater is constructed around a set of essays that at first reading seem to stand independently from each other. Part autobiography, part poetry, Darkwater takes the reader on a spiritual journey. The objective is two-fold: to understand the world of work and wealth, of beauty and death, from the perspective of black folk; and to offer white America a way out of its own racial hatred, through the salvation of hope in humanity. In a sense, what Du Bois wants to achieve is the deconstruction of both whiteness as a social category, and of its hierarchies of oppression. For this to be accomplished, Du Bois contends that white Americans must come to a new understanding and an appreciation of what it means to be black.

The deliberately provocative style of Du Boiss arguments is a striking characteristic of this work. Unlike Booker T. Washington, Du Bois does not attempt to persuade or cajole his white audience. Instead, he insults, shocks, and denounces whites, but with the purpose of saving both them and world civilization from themselves. A belief in humanity, Du Bois declares, is a belief in coloured men .... Europe has never produced, and never will in our day bring forth, a single human soul who cannot be matched and overmatched by Asia and Africa. In language that would later be echoed by black revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon, Du Bois insists that a global struggle for power is unfolding, bringing the black and brown masses of colonized nations into conflict with the capitalist power of Europe and America. Du Bois demands freedom for the Negro: freedom from insult, from segregation, from poverty and physical slavery, and if the attitude of the European and American worlds is in the future going to be based essentially upon the same policies as in the past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darker blood to do, and that is definitely, and as openly as possible, to organize his world for war against Europe.