'The souls of black folk,' a century hence

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2003 by Lewis, David Levering

Although it could never be said that Du Bois discounted race as one of the building blocks of the social universe, over time he did come to emphasize the maldistribution of wealth in his own country, and beyond, as the fundamental impediment to the expansion of human rights. In his magisterial 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois would call the widespread conviction that the unregulated market economy determined best the social application of the nation's fabulous material resources the "great American Assumption." Better known to historians as the creed of American exceptionalism, this doctrine is one of the oldest pseudo-verities animating the Republic. It holds that history weighs lightly upon the land and its people; that progress in all its dimensions is linear and infinite in the United States, and that the power of individuals to shape their destinies in America has been and remains unparalleled in human experience. But what was true for some Americans was much less true for many others, and for some it was not true at all. It befell critics such as W.E.B. Du Bois to speak for the marginalized and excluded by bringing to the agora of American concerns messages of distress, of increasing alarm and ultimately of condign reproach.

A searing passage in The Souls of Black Folk exclaims: "To be a poor man in a land of dollars is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships." It is in the eloquent, tenacious resistance to the reigning premise of the market as social panacea that Du Bois' evolving critique of race and democracy achieves its lasting significance. By the time Du Bois made his well-timed exit, dying on the eve of the historic 1963 March on Washington, he had repeatedly proclaimed in so many words that the cash-line was the cardinal problem of the age. Souls would have been recognized as a work of unique significance even if some uncharacteristic caution of the last minute had kept the third essay in the collection locked away in Du Bois' desk drawer. Out of the drawer, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" made Souls a contemporary bombshell. It indicted the most powerful Black man in the nation and introduced the public to a small band of highly accomplished, mostly Northern men and women of color - a "Talented Tenth" (a phrase actually used only once, in "Of the Training of Black Men") - to whom Washington's dictatorship over educational policy and professional preferment and stance on racial segregation were anathema.

To notables such as Harvard man Monroe Trotter, Princeton man Francis Grimke, Brown man John Hope and crusading suffragist Ida B. Wells, higher education was not merely a personal passport to social and professional standing, but the stepladder to political empowerment of the racial group. This Talented Tenth stood ready to undertake "a duty stern and delicate," the author warned - "a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader," unalterably convinced as they were "that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them."