“Of Our Spiritual Strivings” W.E.B DuBois
DuBois wrestles with his own individual humanity and the racialized confinement that he
and millions of other persons of African descent born into America faced over against a
society that made them invisible and forced them to live behind what he called a “veil.”
We also return to Du Bois in this section for his poignant declaration of the African
American's quest for identity—the "longing to attain self-conscious manhood." Although
granted freedom, citizenship, and suffrage by the Civil War amendments, the
emancipated black person had yet to be seen as a person by white society—and, often,
by himself or herself. By the fact of being black, one qualified as a "problem." By the fact
of being black, one had to maintain a "double consciousness"—looking at oneself first
through the eyes of white society. How does selfhood survive these obstacles? How
does one maintain self-respect in this environment? Where does one find solace from
the strife?
Du Bois's responses to these questions reflect his perspective as an educated northern
black man. Born in 1868 in Massachusetts into a family that had long been free, Du
Bois pursued education with intellectual fervor. Beginning his college education at Fisk
University in Nashville, Tennessee, he was exposed to the plight of former slaves living
in the hostile South. After completing a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, he returned to the
South to teach, soon becoming a spokesman for equal political rights for African
Americans. A vital text, especially for the "vocabulary" of identity and selfhood that he
created for his times. 7 pages.
Note: Du Bois opens each chapter of Souls with a poetic verse and the score of a
spiritual (a "sorrow song"). In chapter one, the spiritual is "Nobody Knows the Trouble
I've Seen" and the verse is Arthur Symon's "The Crying of Water."