The following excerpt from Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up from Slavery, gives an
example of Washington's views on education and self-improvement. Washington wrote his
autobiography for a predominantly white audience. The spelling and other conventions reflect
those of the time period in which the book was written.
From Up from Slavery
Ch. 10, pp. 69-70
By Booker T. Washington
From the very beginning, at Tuskegee, I was determined to have the students do not only the
agricultural and domestic work, but to have them erect their own buildings. My plan was to have
them, while performing this service, taught the latest methods of labour, so that the school would
not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not
only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from
mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake. My plan was not to teach
them to work in the old way, but to show them how to make the forces of nature—air, water,
steam, electricity, horse-power—assist them in their labour.
At first many advised against the experiment of having the buildings erected by the labour of the
students, but I was determined to stick to it. I told those who doubted the wisdom of the plan that
I knew that our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their finish as
buildings erected by the experienced hands of outside workmen, but that in the teaching of
civilization, self-help, and self-reliance, the erection of the buildings by the students themselves
would more than compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.
I further told those who doubted the wisdom of this plan, that the majority of our students came
to us in poverty, from the cabins of the cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the South, and that
while I knew it would please the students very much to place them at once in finely constructed
buildings, I felt that it would be following out a more natural process of development to teach
them how to construct their own buildings. Mistakes I knew would be made, but these mistakes
would teach us valuable lessons for the future.
During the now nineteen years' existence of the Tuskegee school, the plan of having the
buildings erected by student labour has been adhered to. In this time forty buildings, counting
small and large, have been built, and all except four are almost wholly the product of student
labour. As an additional result, hundreds of men are now scattered throughout the South who
received their knowledge of mechanics while being taught how to erect these buildings. Skill and
knowledge are now handed down from one set of students to another in this way, until at the
present time a building of any description or size can be constructed wholly by our instructors
and students, from the drawing of the plans to the putting in of the electric fixtures, without
going off grounds for a single workman.
Not a few times, when a new student has been led into the temptation of marring the looks of
some building by leadpencil marks or by the cuts of a jack-knife, I have heard an old student
remind him: "Don't do that. That is our building. I helped put it up."
Source: Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996.
Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights
reserved.
Journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett began a decades-long crusade against lynching in 1892, after
three young black businessmen (one of them a friend of hers) were lynched in Memphis,
Tennessee. In this article, published in the progressive magazine The Arena in January 1900, she
focused on the “unwritten law” that meant that no black man was safe from lynching if a white
woman charged him with rape. Wells-Barnett argued that interracial rape was much more likely
to involve black victims than white. She also provided vivid examples of the brutality of
lynching, with mobs often torturing their victims before killing them and, in one case in Texas,
the mayor declaring a holiday so schoolchildren could watch.
Lynch Law in America
By Ida B. Wells-Barnett
OUR country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of
uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool,
calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an "unwritten law"
that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial
by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal. The "unwritten law"
first found excuse with the rough, rugged, and determined man who left the civilized centers of
eastern States to seek for quick returns in the gold-fields of the far West. Following in uncertain
pursuit of continually eluding fortune, they dared the savagery of the Indians, the hardships of
mountain travel, and the constant terror of border State outlaws. Naturally, they felt slight
toleration for traitors in their own ranks. It was enough to fight the enemies from without; woe to
the foe within! Far removed from and entirely without protection of the courts of civilized life,
these fortune-seekers made laws to meet their varying emergencies. The thief who stole a horse,
the bully who "jumped" a claim, was a common enemy. If caught he was promptly tried, and if
found guilty was hanged to the tree under which the court convened.
Those were busy days of busy men. They had no time to give the prisoner a bill of exception or
stay of execution. The only way a man had to secure a stay of execution was to behave himself.
Judge Lynch was original in methods but exceedingly effective in procedure. He made the
charge, impaneled the jurors, and directed the execution. When the court adjourned, the prisoner
was dead. Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories
and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching
gradually disappeared from the West.
But the spirit of mob procedure seemed to have fastened itself upon the lawless classes, and the
grim process that at first was invoked to declare justice was made the excuse to wreak vengeance
and cover crime. It next appeared in the South, where centuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization had
made effective all the safeguards of court procedure. No emergency called for lynch law. It
asserted its sway in defiance of law and in favor of anarchy. There it has flourished ever since,
marking the thirty years of its existence with the inhuman butchery of more than ten thousand
men, women, and children by shooting, drowning, hanging, and burning them alive. Not only
this, but so potent is the force of example that the lynching mania has spread throughout the
North and middle West. It is now no uncommon thing to read of lynchings north of Mason and
Dixon's line, and those most responsible for this fashion gleefully point to these instances and
assert that the North is no better than the South.
This is the work of the "unwritten law" about which so much is said, and in whose behest
butchery is made a pastime and national savagery condoned. The first statute of this "unwritten
law" was written in the blood of thousands of brave men who thought that a government that was
good enough to create a citizenship was strong enough to protect it. Under the authority of a
national law that gave every citizen the right to vote, the newly-made citizens chose to exercise
their suffrage. But the reign of the national law was short-lived and illusionary. Hardly had the
sentences dried upon the statute-books before one Southern State after another raised the cry
against "negro domination" and proclaimed there was an "unwritten law" that justified any
means to resist it.
The method then inaugurated was the outrages by the "red-shirt" bands of Louisiana, South
Carolina, and other Southern States, which were succeeded by the Ku-Klux Klans. These
advocates of the "unwritten law" boldly avowed their purpose to intimidate, suppress, and nullify
the negro's right to vote. In support of its plans the Ku-Klux Klans, the "red-shirt" and similar
organizations proceeded to beat, exile, and kill negroes until the purpose of their organization
was accomplished and the supremacy of the "unwritten law" was effected. Thus lynchings began
in the South, rapidly spreading into the various States until the national law was nullified and the
reign of the "unwritten law" was supreme. Men were taken from their homes by "red-shirt"
bands and stripped, beaten, and exiled: others were assassinated when their political prominence
made them obnoxious to their political opponents; while the Ku-Klux barbarism of election days,
reveling in the butchery of thousands of colored voters, furnished records in Congressional
investigations that are a disgrace to civilization.
The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the
negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes
should have ceased. But men, women, and children were the victims of murder by individuals
and murder by mobs, just as they had been when killed at the demands of the "unwritten law" to
prevent "negro domination." Negroes were killed for disputing over terms of contracts with their
employers. If a few barns were burned some colored man was killed to stop it. If a colored man
resented the imposition of a white man and the two came to blows, the colored man had to die,
either at the hands of the white man then and there or later at the hands of a mob that speedily
gathered. If he showed a spirit of courageous manhood he was hanged for his pains, and the
killing was justified by the declaration that he was a "saucy nigger." Colored women have been
murdered because they refused to tell the mobs where relatives could be found for "lynching
bees." Boys of fourteen years have been lynched by white representatives of American
civilization. In fact, for all kinds of offenses—and for no offenses—from murders to
misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the
political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the
same. A new name was given to the killings and a new excuse was invented for so doing.
Again the aid of the "unwritten law" is invoked, and again it comes to the rescue. During the last
ten years a new statute has been added to the "unwritten law." This statute proclaims that for
certain crimes or alleged crimes no negro shall be allowed a trial; that no white woman shall be
compelled to charge an assault under oath or to submit any such charge to the investigation of a
court of law. The result is that many men have been put to death whose innocence was afterward
established; and to-day, under this reign of the "unwritten law," no colored man, no matter what
his reputation, is safe from lynching if a white woman, no matter what her standing or motive,
cares to charge him with insult or assault.
It is considered a sufficient excuse and reasonable justification to put a prisoner to death under
this "unwritten law" for the frequently repeated charge that these lynching horrors are necessary
to prevent crimes against women. The sentiment of the country has been appealed to, in
describing the isolated condition of white families in thickly populated negro districts; and the
charge is made that these homes are in as great danger as if they were surrounded by wild beasts.
And the world has accepted this theory without let or hindrance. In many cases there has been
open expression that the fate meted out to the victim was only what he deserved. In many other
instances there has been a silence that says more forcibly than words can proclaim it that it is
right and proper that a human being should be seized by a mob and burned to death upon the
unsworn and the uncorroborated charge of his accuser. No matter that our laws presume every
man innocent until he is proved guilty; no matter that it leaves a certain class of individuals
completely at the mercy of another class; no matter that it encourages those criminally disposed
to blacken their faces and commit any crime in the calendar so long as they can throw suspicion
on some negro, as is frequently done, and then lead a mob to take his life; no matter that mobs
make a farce of the law and a mockery of justice; no matter that hundreds of boys are being
hardened in crime and schooled in vice by the repetition of such scenes before their eyes—if a
white woman declares herself insulted or assaulted, some life must pay the penalty, with all the
horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The world looks on
and says it is well.
Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country
by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. In many instances the leading
citizens aid and abet by their presence when they do not participate, and the leading journals
inflame the public mind to the lynching point with scare-head articles and offers of rewards.
Whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are
taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred
years ago. There is, however, this difference: in those old days the multitude that stood by was
permitted only to guy or jeer. The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and
fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the
leaders of the mob are so minded, coal-oil is poured over the body and the victim is then roasted
to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman,
Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school
children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human
being burned to death. In Texarkana, the year before, men and boys amused themselves by
cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim. At Newman, Ga., of the
present year, the mob tried every conceivable torture to compel the victim to cry out and confess,
before they set fire to the faggots that burned him. But their trouble was all in vain—he never
uttered a cry, and they could not make him confess.
This condition of affairs were brutal enough and horrible enough if it were true that lynchings
occurred only because of the commission of crimes against women—as is constantly declared by
ministers, editors, lawyers, teachers, statesmen, and even by women themselves. It has been to
the interest of those who did the lynching to blacken the good name of the helpless and
defenseless victims of their hate. For this reason they publish at every possible opportunity this
excuse for lynching, hoping thereby not only to palliate their own crime but at the same time to
prove the negro a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy of the civilized
world. But this alleged reason adds to the deliberate injustice of the mob's work. Instead of
lynchings being caused by assaults upon women, the statistics show that not one-third of the
victims of lynchings are even charged with such crimes. The Chicago Tribune, which publishes
annually lynching statistics, is authority for the following:
In 1892, when lynching reached high-water mark, there were 241 persons lynched. The entire
number is divided among the following States:
Alabama 22
Arkansas 25
California 3
Florida 11
Georgia 17
Idaho 8
Illinois 1
Kansas 3
Kentucky 9
Louisiana 29
Maryland 1
Mississippi 16
Missouri 6
Montana 4
New York 1
North Carolina 5
North Dakota 1
Ohio 3
South Carolina 5
Tennessee 28
Texas 15
Virginia 7
West Virginia 5
Wyoming 9
Arizona Ter. 3
Oklahoma 2
Of this number, 160 were of negro descent. Four of them were lynched in New York, Ohio, and
Kansas; the remainder were murdered in the South. Five of this number were females. The
charges for which they were lynched cover a wide range. They are as follows:
Rape 46
Murder 58
Rioting 3
Race prejudice 6
No cause given 4
Incendiarism 6
Robbery 6
Assault, battery 1
Attempted rape 11
Suspected robbery 4
Larceny 1
Self-defense 1
Insulting women 2
Desperadoes 6
Fraud 1
Attempted murder 2
No offense stated, boy and girl 2
In the case of the boy and girl above referred to, their father, named Hastings, was accused of the
murder of a white man. His fourteen-year-old daughter and sixteen-year-old son were hanged
and their bodies filled with bullets; then the father was also lynched. This occurred in November,
1892, at Jonesville, La.
Indeed, the record for the last twenty years shows exactly the same or a smaller proportion who
have been charged with this horrible crime. Quite a number of the one-third alleged cases of
assault that have been personally investigated by the writer have shown that there was no
foundation in fact for the charges; yet the claim is not made that there were no real culprits
among them. The negro has been too long associated with the white man not to have copied his
vices as well as his virtues. But the negro resents and utterly repudiates the effort to blacken his
good name by asserting that assaults upon women are peculiar to his race. The negro has
suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men
than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes. Very scant notice is taken of the matter
when this is the condition of affairs. What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when
the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.
But since the world has accepted this false and unjust statement, and the burden of proof has
been placed upon the negro to vindicate his race, he is taking steps to do so. The Anti-Lynching
Bureau of the National Afro-American Council is arranging to have every lynching investigated
and publish the facts to the world, as has been done in the case of Sam Hose, who was burned
alive last April at Newman, Ga. The detective's report showed that Hose killed Cranford, his
employer, in self-defense, and that, while a mob was organizing to hunt Hose to punish him for
killing a white man, not till twenty-four hours after the murder was the charge of rape,
embellished with psychological and physical impossibilities, circulated. That gave an impetus to
the hunt, and the Atlanta Constitution's reward of $500 keyed the mob to the necessary burning
and roasting pitch. Of five hundred newspaper clippings of that horrible affair, nine-tenths of
them assumed Hose's guilt—simply because his murderers said so, and because it is the fashion
to believe the negro peculiarly addicted to this species of crime. All the negro asks is justice—a
fair and impartial trial in the courts of the country. That given, he will abide the result.
But this question affects the entire American nation, and from several points of view: First, on
the ground of consistency. Our watchword has been "the land of the free and the home of the
brave." Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so
gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Neither do brave men or
women stand by and see such things done without compunction of conscience, nor read of them
without protest. Our nation has been active and outspoken in its endeavors to right the wrongs of
the Armenian Christian, the Russian Jew, the Irish Home Ruler, the native women of India, the
Siberian exile, and the Cuban patriot. Surely it should be the nation's duty to correct its own
evils!
Second, on the ground of economy. To those who fail to be convinced from any other point of
view touching this momentous question, a consideration of the economic phase might not be
amiss. It is generally known that mobs in Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, and other States have
lynched subjects of other countries. When their different governments demanded satisfaction,
our country was forced to confess her inability to protect said subjects in the several States
because of our State-rights doctrines, or in turn demand punishment of the lynchers. This
confession, while humiliating in the extreme, was not satisfactory; and, while the United States
cannot protect, she can pay. This she has done, and it is certain will have to do again in the case
of the recent lynching of Italians in Louisiana. The United States already has paid in indemnities
for lynching nearly a half million dollars, as follows:
Paid China for Rock Springs (Wyo.) massacre: $147,748.74
Paid China for outrages on Pacific Coast: 276,619.75
Paid Italy for massacre of Italian prisoners at New Orleans: 24,330.09
Paid Italy for lynchings at Walsenburg, Col.: 10,000.00
Paid Great Britain for outrages on James Bain and Frederick Dawson: 2,800.00
Third, for the honor of Anglo-Saxon civilization. No scoffer at our boasted American civilization
could say anything more harsh of it than does the American white man himself who says he is
unable to protect the honor of his women without resort to such brutal, inhuman, and degrading
exhibitions as characterize "lynching bees." The cannibals of the South Sea Islands roast human
beings alive to satisfy hunger. The red Indian of the Western plains tied his prisoner to the stake,
tortured him, and danced in fiendish glee while his victim writhed in the flames. His savage,
untutored mind suggested no better way than that of wreaking vengeance upon those who had
wronged him. These people knew nothing about Christianity and did not profess to follow its
teachings; but such primary laws as they had they lived up to. No nation, savage or civilized,
save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by
hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.
Finally, for love of country. No American travels abroad without blushing for shame for his
country on this subject. And whatever the excuse that passes current in the United States, it
avails nothing abroad. With all the powers of government in control; with all laws made by white
men, administered by white judges, jurors, prosecuting attorneys, and sheriffs; with every office
of the executive department filled by white men—no excuse can be offered for exchanging the
orderly administration of justice for barbarous lynchings and "unwritten laws." Our country
should be placed speedily above the plane of confessing herself a failure at self-government.
This cannot be until Americans of every section, of broadest patriotism and best and wisest
citizenship, not only see the defect in our country's armor but take the necessary steps to remedy
it. Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty
years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the
country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter. Indeed, the silence and seeming condonation
grow more marked as the years go by.
A few months ago the conscience of this country was shocked because, after a two-weeks trial, a
French judicial tribunal pronounced Captain [Alfred] Dreyfus guilty [Dreyfus was falsely
convicted of treason in 1894]. And yet, in our own land and under our own flag, the writer can
give day and detail of one thousand men, women, and children who during the last six years
were put to death without trial before any tribunal on earth. Humiliating indeed, but altogether
unanswerable, was the reply of the French press to our protest: "Stop your lynchings at home
before you send your protests abroad."
Source: The Arena, January 1900.
Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights
reserved.
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), black American writer, historian, sociologist, and noted
intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois sought to describe the black experience in America. "One ever
feels his twoness," he wrote, "-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder."
From The Souls of Black Folk
By W. E. B. Du Bois
The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of
being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest
to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving
mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth
hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten
thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what
Emancipation meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out
the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticised candidly the leader who bears the chief burden
of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds
within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of training men for life.
Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed
millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relations of
the sons of master and man.
Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow,
and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom
written....
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through
feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless,
flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say,
I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these
Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling
to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem?
I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been
anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking
boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when
the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the
dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a
package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness
that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through;
I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great
wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or
beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine
contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were
theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from
them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling
the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not
so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why
did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house
closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall,
and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms
against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a
sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a
world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the
revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of
always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he
wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has
too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to
make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit
upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both
death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of
body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a
mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.
Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days
since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving
has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like
weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed
struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere
hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a
poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a
heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor
was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward
ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by
the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors,
while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.
The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and asinging raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to
him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate
the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two
unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation,
and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt
and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as
did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice;
Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the
eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and
curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully,
like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive
cadences:—
"Shout, O children!Shout, you're free!For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years
of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the
Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:—
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nervesShall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his
promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep
disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the
unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed
ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading
the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpetbaggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the
bewildered serf with no new watch-word beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful
means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked
upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting
the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war
and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible
to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote
themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the
half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a
new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the
rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It
was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test
the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to
have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation
and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have
watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark
pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was
weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also
where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon
was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however,
the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at
least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the
youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of
his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet
he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim
feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first
time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social
degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a
cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich,
landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is
the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of
life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of
decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance.
The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women
had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the
hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the
obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to
give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully
count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain
it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against
crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to
so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture,
righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that
nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh
speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation,
the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the
boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything
black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm
and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, selfdisparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an
atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds:
Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what
need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced
this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the
suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful
adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities,
and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad
waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body
and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright
ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of
hands,—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are
they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the
dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not
know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted
and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of
deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds
and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us
from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life and
limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all
these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding
each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of
human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and
developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races,
but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some
day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are to-day no truer
exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American
Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the
American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the
sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America
be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro
humility? or her coarse and cruel with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the
soul of the Sorrow Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem,
and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost
beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name
of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many
ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of
black folk.
Source: Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Penguin Books.
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