Souls of Black Folk: a Call for Ultimate Liberation
Published in 1903, Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois remains to be one of the most important and a pioneering book on political, economic, social, and cultures lives of African-Americans in America. It is a collection of autobiographical and other essays by Du Bois that touch upon a variety of issues, including slavery, racism, liberation, history of African-Americans, and the questions of identity and consciousness. The main argument of Du Bois in this book is that African-Americans need to develop spiritually and through education to attain full political, economic, and social rights alongside Whites in America. Du Bois predicted that it would be a long struggle and therefore argued at the beginning of his book that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of color line" (Du Bois vii). Throughout the book, Du Bois discusses several issues to prove his thesis. He discusses the invisibility of Blacks in American history because of the "veil," failure of Reconstruction policies, lack of education, and the failures of previous African-American leaders and Churches in properly championing the rights of colored people after the Emancipation.
The question of the "veil" is a recurring theme in Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois argues that African-Americans have been left outside the realm of the world seen by Whites, i.e. behind a veil. The veil makes it hard Black souls to see the world. African-Americans thus are "invisible" in history and at present as human beings with true aspirations and rich souls. "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," Du Bois says, "a world which yields him no true sense of self-consciousness,...
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