Making It New: 1900–1945 323Negro.” It was a “gospel of Work and Money” founded on a “triple paradox,” by
which Du Bois meant that, as he saw it, Washington was asking black people to
sacrifice the three things they most urgently needed. These three, as Du Bois
succinctly summarized them, were “the right to vote,” “civic equality,” and “the
education of youth according to ability.” Washington, Du Bois argued, tended to shift
responsibility for the racial problem from white people “to the Negro’s shoulders”;
whereas “in fact the burden belongs to the nation.” “So far as Mr. Washington
preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up
his hands and strive with him,” he concluded. “But as far as Mr. Washington apolo-
gizes for injustice ..., does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles
the emasculating effects of caste distinction, and opposes the higher training ...
of our brighter minds,” then, Du Bois insisted, he and those like him had to be
“unceasingly and firmly” opposed.
Du Bois had been born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk and Harvard
universities. He had had little personal experience of the social and political exclusion
of blacks until he went south to Fisk in 1885. “I suddenly came to a region where the
world was split into white and black halves,” he wrote later, “and where the darker
half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds.” In the first stages of his career
he devoted himself to the scholarly study of the status and condition of black people
in the United States. His books during this period included The Suppression of the
African Slave Trade to the United States of America (1896) and The Philadelphia
Negro: A Social Study (1899). But Du Bois wanted to reach a wider audience. For
him, racial prejudice was a national issue and an intensely urgent one. As he put it,
“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of race.” And he wanted to
make as many people as he could, black and white, aware of it. So he began to
experiment with different forms, various ways of communicating with the general
public. These included general studies of black people in the United States, such as
The Negro (1915), The Gift of Black Folk (1935), and Black Reconstruction (1935).
They included essays, poems, short stories, plays, and sketches, many of which were
published in two magazines he edited, The Moon and The Horizon. They included a
novel, Dark Princess (1928), and an autobiographical work, Dusk of Dawn (1945),
which Du Bois described as “the autobiography of a concept of race.” Du Bois’s
activism led him to help found the National Association for the Advancement for
Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and to edit its magazine, The Crisis, from 1910
until 1934. But his major and most influential work was the one in which he launched
his attack on Booker T. Washington – which, unsurprisingly, initiated the most bitter
phase of the conflict between the two black leaders – The Souls of Black Folk.
The Souls of Black Folk uses song, sketch, and story to explore the condition of
black people in terms that are at once brilliantly intuitive and piercingly analytical.
In the first chapter, for instance, Du Bois begins with two epigraphs: one from a
spiritual (or what Du Bois himself called a “sorrow song”), “Nobody Knows the
Trouble I’ve Seen,” the other from a poem by Arthur Symons about loss. He then
moves into a restlessly imaginative exploration of what he calls “our spiritual striv-
ings.” The chapter is a secular transposition of the theme of the spiritual: an accountGGray_c04.indd 323ray_c 04 .indd 323 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM