The Souls of Black Folk

by

W.E.B. Du Bois

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Souls of Black Folk makes teaching easy.

W.E.B. Du Bois Character Analysis

As well as being the author and narrator of the book, Du Bois also plays a prominent role as a character within his own narrative. Much of the book consists of first-person accounts of Du Bois’ own experiences, and particularly those experiences that helped develop his awareness of the issues of race and racism. Although Du Bois narrates his own story non-chronologically, overall the book provides a comprehensive account of his life from childhood onwards. Born to a fairly affluent free family in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended an integrated school and describes becoming aware of the Veil for the first time when children in his class exchanged greeting cards and a little white girl refused to accept his card. Rather than becoming embittered—as other figures such as Alexander Crummell and John Jones are tempted to do—Du Bois resolved to work hard academically in order to overcome the effects of racism. On some levels, this plan succeeded. Du Bois had an immensely successful academic career, becoming the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard and eventually taking a professorship at Atlanta University, where he wrote The Souls of Black Folk. However, Du Bois makes clear that his academic success and other fortunate experiences in his life, while positive, are still overwhelmed by the constant presence of the Veil. Like other intelligent, well-educated black figures in the book, Du Bois remains keenly aware of the plight of those less fortunate than him even as he achieves great personal success. Indeed, he uses his position of influence in order to try and help black people who do not have the same resources or power in society, focusing on those worst off—the rural poor in the South. Despite his professional success, however, Du Bois’ life was not untainted by personal tragedy. His first child, a son named Burghardt, died in infancy, an event he chronicles in the chapter entitled “Of the Passing of the First-Born.” In this chapter, Du Bois reveals his own vulnerabilities and expresses some of his more cynical thoughts about the nature of racial justice and progress. Although he claims it is possible that race relations may have improved over the course of his son’s lifetime, he also suggests that the only time African-Americans can achieve true freedom is in death.

W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes in The Souls of Black Folk

The The Souls of Black Folk quotes below are all either spoken by W.E.B. Du Bois or refer to W.E.B. Du Bois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Slavery vs. Freedom Theme Icon
).
The Forethought Quotes

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Color Line
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

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 twoness,––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.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Symbols: Double Consciousness
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

There was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification a duty.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character!

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged––wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:

O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

If you wish to ride with me you must come into the "Jim Crow Car." There will be no objection,––already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery––this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

In any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

One can see in the Negro church today, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

It is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,––the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 173
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? –For brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker), Burghardt Du Bois
Related Symbols: The Color Line, The Veil
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,––the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves and millionaires and––sometimes––Negroes became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?"

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:

Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had out- grown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,––to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his… this, this seemed more than man could bear.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker), Alexander Crummell
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Souls of Black Folk LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Souls of Black Folk PDF

W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes in The Souls of Black Folk

The The Souls of Black Folk quotes below are all either spoken by W.E.B. Du Bois or refer to W.E.B. Du Bois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Slavery vs. Freedom Theme Icon
).
The Forethought Quotes

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Color Line
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

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 twoness,––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.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Symbols: Double Consciousness
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

There was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification a duty.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character!

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged––wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:

O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

If you wish to ride with me you must come into the "Jim Crow Car." There will be no objection,––already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery––this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

In any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

One can see in the Negro church today, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

It is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,––the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 173
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? –For brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker), Burghardt Du Bois
Related Symbols: The Color Line, The Veil
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,––the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves and millionaires and––sometimes––Negroes became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?"

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker)
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:

Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had out- grown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,––to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his… this, this seemed more than man could bear.

Related Characters: W.E.B. Du Bois (speaker), Alexander Crummell
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis: