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    The Souls of Black Folk
    The Souls of Black Folk
    The Souls of Black Folk
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Souls of Black Folk

    Written by W. E. B. Du Bois

    Narrated by Richard Allen

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    W. E. B. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk, his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the paradoxical "double-consciousness" of African American life.

    When it was first published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk quickly established itself as a work that wholly redefined the history of the black experience in America, introducing the now-famous "problem of the color line." In the decades since its publication, its stature has only grown, and today it ranks as one of the most influential and resonant works in the history of American thought.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 1, 2008
    ISBN9781400179954
    Author

    W. E. B. Du Bois

    W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and socialist. Born in Massachusetts, he was raised in Great Barrington, an integrated community. He studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard, where he became the first African American scholar to earn a doctorate. He worked as a professor at Atlanta University, a historically Black institution, and was one of the leaders of the Niagara Movement, which advocated for equal rights and opposed Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise. In 1909, he cofounded the NAACP and served for years as the editor of its official magazine The Crisis. In addition to his activism against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination and segregation, Du Bois authored such influential works as The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). A lifelong opponent of racism and a committed pacifist, Du Bois advocated for socialism as a means of replacing racial capitalism in America and around the world. In the 1920s, he used his role at The Crisis to support the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and sought to emphasize the role of African Americans in shaping American society in his book The Gift of Black Folk (1924).

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    Reviews for The Souls of Black Folk

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      The collection of essays by W E B Du Bois shows the injustices and misunderstandings that our prejudices develop. The negro bondage and the ideas it spread in american society are explained. The way black folk react and adjust to this human inequality is the main subject of this valuable work. The chapters about the black faith and church are written in a beautiful style. The book sucedes in demonstrate that our prejudices are often the cause of our problems and miseries.
    • 5/5
      Larsen describes him as "peppery," and I like that. He's civil, but he's quietly laying haymakers. It's an important book. To a depressing extent, when we talk about racial injustice these days, we're still repeating DuBois.

      It is nonfiction - essays on the challenges Blacks face in the wake of the Civil War - so be aware, it's not like it's going to have a plot. I'm reading it one chapter at a time between other things; going straight through was making me miss some stuff.

      The prologue, with the iconic question, "How does it feel to be a Problem?" and the confession that, looking at white folks, Du Bois sometimes wanted to just "beat their stringy heads," is worth the price of admission.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure there is a way to praise this book higher than I would like to. Even its flaws only make it more of its time, more piercingly relevant, more obviously coming out of its context.I came in expecting a successor to Douglass, someone with one foot in prophetic mode and one foot in smackdown mode, and it's true that Du Bois does both of those things fantastically well. But what really gets to me is just how wide-ranging his skillset turns out to be, from long-form reportage to history and historiography, not to mention all this amateur art criticism around slave spirituals. Like a lot of great American writers of the period, he's insanely well-rounded: He can start with a hyper-detailed description of Atlanta, take you into what became the Historically Black Colleges, show you around dirt-poor sharecroppers and taxonomize them by relative levels of poverty and autonomy, tell funny and sad stories about the characters he's met in his travels, then turn around and use one of them to summarize Booker T. Washington and slice his whole program into little ribbons without losing his cool or his politeness. Two minutes later, you're getting a definition of "the veil" or "double consciousness," which people still have to debate the accuracy of as explanatory tools -- then suddenly some Old Testament-level high rhetoric and moral fury drops on you in great big paragraphs of furious dignity.You can tell he's staking out what he wants to call a moderate position here, acknowledging some things that we in the 21st century would call reactionary (the whole bit about the purported stunted moral character of ex-slaves, the Talented Tenth bit about "uplifting the race", and some very wide generalizing). But I don't know of very many people who ever worked in this short-essay form who ever did this better, or who appear to have had such a powerful effect on a debate by straight-up winning the argument.
    • 5/5
      I can see why this book is a classic. Despite my 5-star rating, it was very, very tough going for me; painful at times. Nevertheless, extremely worthwhile to get inside the head and passions of an extremely brilliant African-American man at the turn of the century. I suspect a great many of his ideas, arguments, and conclusions would be applicable today.
    • 5/5
      This book has 100 patterns. it is filled with pictures patterns and very clear instructions,on Sahiko
    • 3/5
      While interesting to see what has changed (and sadly note what has not), I found that these essays didn't impact me the way Zora Neale Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" did. I guess I relate to the more intimate personal lives shown in novels than the same situation shown in aggregate form in nonfiction. The parts I liked best were the ones that dealt with individuals, such as 'Of the Coming of John'.Mirron Willis's narration may have played a role in my feelings for the book, as his deep slow voice was soporific. I had to speed up the narration to 2x to get what felt like normal speed to me.
    • 3/5
      I appreciate DuBois’s classic study of race as an historical document, and at times even as a piece of literature. I particularly value his depiction of the political, social and material conditions in the South immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, I question some of his proposals and conclusions. Although his views may have been radical in 1903, many of them now sound paternalistic and outdated. Perhaps that, in and of itself, is a sign of progress.
      The Souls of Black Folk, of course, is didactic. It’s also a polemic, for DuBois’s stated aims are to both instruct and convince his audience. Many indications in his prose suggest that he conceived his audience to be “the best kind” of white people, and more Northern, I think, than Southern. I don’t think his arguments are directed toward “the best kind” of Negro. I use these terms because they are his, and because this sorting of people, both black and white, into categories of “best” and “worst,” is one of the things that most irritates me about DuBois’s thinking. He touts The Talented Tenth (although he may not have coined this phrase, it became intimately associated with his ideas) as worthy candidates for a classical liberal education and as the source of leadership for “their race.” He admits the need for a sort of benevolent guardianship (by the Talented Tenth and enlightened whites) over the masses of unschooled and largely impoverished black folks in the South. He says, “the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.”
      Besides the Talented Tenth, two other concepts are integral to Du Bois’s thinking, that of The Veil, which is both a physical and social demarcation of difference, and double-consciousness, defined as “a peculiar sensation, . . . this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . . one ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro.”
      Although he argues against Booker T. Washington’s preaching of abandonment of political and social goals in order to focus solely on material gains for blacks, Du Bois himself proposes that blacks not fit to benefit from the education he proposes for The Talented Tenth should indeed settle for training in a trade and much more limited aspirations.(Apparently, Du Bois modified these views somewhat later in his life.) On the other hand, Du Bois is often forceful in his defense of equal rights for all blacks, for example, when he states, “Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”
      Although many of the social conditions that Du Bois references have been ameliorated over time, some of his observations sound uncomfortably current today, such as the following: “the white folk say it [the county prison:] is ever full of black criminals,--the black folks say that only colored boys are ever sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor.”
    • 5/5
      This was an Audible impulse buy, but I'm glad I got it. DuBois, an African-American university professor in the early 1900s, wrote this book as a response to Booker T. Washington's plan for the post-slavery black community, and as a documentation of the kind of demoralization, fragmentation, and hopelessness of black America post-Civil War.Washington's approach was pragmatic. African-Americans should stop lobbying for political rights. (Perhaps he felt it would incite too much backlash?) They should not dream of going to college, but of attending technical schools and going into the trades. Black America will succeed by putting their heads down and working hard for economic prosperity, with healthy doses of thrift and sacrifice.DuBois' response was that a culture needs more than bread to live on. African-Americans needed to gain the ability to think about the world they live in, to articulate their experience and what they have to offer to our country. This could only come about through liberal education, not trade school alone. DuBois points out that the teachers at Washington's trade schools were not trained at trade schools, but at black colleges. These colleges also produced needed moral, spiritual, and intellectual leaders of the black community: professors, preachers, doctors, and other professionals.Besides, Du Bois points out, Washington's ethic of "buckle down, work hard" doesn't even work. Du Bois documents the very real economic plight of the supposedly freed men and women. Though they are legally free, they are trapped in a cycle of indebted tenant farming. The few who, through ingenuity and the luck of a few good harvests, save up the money to buy their own land, are often cheated by whites who take their money and run. This and other structural inequalities, such as poor education funding and unstable families due to the heritage of slavery, expose Washington's philosophy for the canard it is - so says Du Bois. This book has made me curious to read Washington and hear his side of the story.Formerly, said Du Bois, the 'best' blacks (the house slaves) and the 'best' whites were intimate, living together and having bonds of quasi-family ties; now they are segregated. How then can we understand one another? What's so sad is that most of this book can still apply today. In some ways, not much has changed for African-Americans living with the legacy of slavery and subsequent political and economic disenfranchisement. As a historical work, Du Bois' book is important to read 113 years later; his bristling literary style, full of high-brow literary allusions, only adds pleasure.
    • 4/5
      “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” “America is not another word for opportunity to all her sons.” This is my introduction into W.E.B. Dubois and what a fine place to start. This essay collection was written in 1903 but still feels as fresh and relevant, (maybe, even more so) as it was then. He discusses the many indignities of slavery and the racial injustices that continued through his day. I think this is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about slavery and the African-American struggle, which continues, unabated, in 2019.
    • 4/5
      A fairly interesting look at life - predominantly in the south - following the Civil War: a period generally known as Reconstruction. I like Du Bois's factual, yet artistic description of the failings - of the North, of the South, and even of black people to secure proper liberty following the war.
    • 5/5
      I read this book for the first time when I was in my doctoral coursework taking a historical philosophy course. EXCELLENT book! Within two weeks of reading it I was visiting my hometown in the south. While there I reread the book and (WOW!)saw that although we think things have changed, they haven't. The dreams of Dubois in 1904 are still unrealized. I have recommended this book to many friends and colleagues. They have the same reactions to the book. It is a must read and should be studied by all post-secondary students.
    • 3/5
      The black experience is well documented in this work of fiction. Recommend.
    • 4/5
      W.E.B. Du Bois narrates his journeys of the South after the Emancipation of slavery. It tells of the systemic racism that was institutionalized during this time. My professor at the University of Texas at Austin told me to read this after discussion of Booker T Washington's book, Up From Slavery. He said this gave a more accurate picture of the time. It was very eye-opening for me since I never studied this literature in my high school or college courses. As an education historian I used this book to make many connections about how African Americans were unfairly treated during the Reconstruction Era and beyond leading to current achievement gaps. It was a very dense book and took a lot of time to get through the content. My copy is full of highlighting, notes, and underlined pieces. I'm a better person for having read it!
    • 5/5
      You must experience this book by reading it for the first time. I don't know how I left college without ever reading essential DuBois. The book is basically a snap shot of the historical events he witnessed, his observation and relations with people and commentary. The writing style AWESOME, complicated, and balanced, all at the same time. What I can appreciate most is that the book is as much a guide on credit, debt, personal financial loss and charity, as it is on social and political science.Shortly after the war the freedmen contributed $750,000 to their educational betterment, purchased land, started various business enterprises, and saved with Freedmen's Bureau Bank. This showed incredible thrift on their part, a kind of thrift that can be admired even today.
    • 5/5
      The author's attempt, through various narratives, to assist white America in 1903 to perhaps come to a better understanding of the situation and condition of America's black population.DuBois is a masterful author. In this book he does everything from defending the Freedmen's Bureau to describing the plight of black people in a particular county in Georgia. He speaks of his own experiences as a college student, as a teacher, and of the loss of his own child to illness. He preserves the tunes of many a song and ends his book with a chapter on such songs.Above all things DuBois proves prophetic, declaring that the 20th century would be overshadowed by the "Negro problem" and perceiving that Reconstruction would be looked upon poorly for many generations and could only be seen in a more positive light once black America was re-enfranchised. He provides an important perspective, writing just as a new and quite powerful wave of resentment overcame the South in the form of the Jim Crow laws and even greater restrictions than before, standing a generation removed from slavery and yet with the stories of slaves still ringing in their ears, looking forward to struggle which would take the better part of the century...and after more than a century has still not come to a complete end. Over 100 years later the book remains compelling and a valuable read for any who would still wish to explore the "souls of black folk."
    • 4/5
      Wonderful, enlightening book. I learned a lot!!
    • 4/5
      This nonfiction, essay was written in 1903 by W.E.B DuBois, a black American author, sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist. This essay talks about the problems facing blacks in America after the civil war and freedom. It even looks at how Booker T. Washington was not completely helpful in his support of black efforts. Du Bois opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. The author was the first African American to earn a doctorate in the United States and was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rating: This book is nonfiction, was received as part of the summer free audio books for young people. The author made significant contribution to rights of blacks and Asians in both the US and in other colonies. This is an essay that spells out what he thinks is needed to advance African Americans. I rate it 4 (nonfiction)
    • 5/5
      I felt like I was living in the late 19th century. The book really came to life!
    • 5/5
      Experience the last two centuries in the lives of Black Americans...feel their plight for more understanding.....to read this is to know why.!
    • 4/5
      It is impossible to rate The Souls of Black Folk too highly. It is a worthwhile read solely for the impact that it has had upon American society, both in its time and in the decades since its 1903 publication. The Souls of Black Folk was a major contribution to the African-American literary tradition, and it is also a cornerstone of the literature on sociology. Beyond its historical and educational value, though, I highly recommend this book to everyone for the piercing glimpses Du Bois offers into the souls of all men and women.W. E. B. Du Bois first came under the spotlight by opposing Booker T. Washington, a prominent member of the African-American community who emphasized the importance of accommodating the policies of race separation prevalent in a Jim Crow society.Du Bois believed that in order to attain suffrage, political representation, and civil rights, American society had to acknowledge the wrongs done to African-Americans and strive to integrate them fully into U.S. society. His book documented the conditions of post-slavery America while simultaneously arguing for improvements in the unequal black and white communities.Du Bois was an impassioned advocate for higher education. While Washington focused on educating blacks for the trades and manual labor, Du Bois insisted that blacks should have access to intellectual education rivaling that available to whites. As Manning Marable states in Living Black History, “Few books make history, and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century.” (96)However, more than simply a revealing microcosm of post–Civil War and Jim Crow society, The Souls of Black Folk offer brilliant glimpses into mankind as a whole, regardless of color. Du Bois discusses religion, politics, history, education, money, morality, music, and mortality. His chapter on death of his young son, his first child, is some of the most impressive, tender, and passionate prose I have ever read.It is easy—at least, it was for me—to pigeonhole Du Bois as a figure who did much for his race in the Jim Crow era, but whose work is outdated and useful only as a historical account. However, this view does Du Bois, and yourself for that matter, a disservice. I found his insight profound and his opinions valuable even after more than a century, and I learned a lot about the nature of people.The salience of The Souls of Black Folk attests to Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of an intellectual tradition, both among black thinkers and, on a grander scale, in the then-emerging field of sociology.Though at times the book seems to be a rather disparate collection of essays loosely centered on African-American (and cultural) identity, that connection serves, in fact,. to emphasize that topic’s importance by displaying the ways in which racism was affecting all areas of African-American life.I have one piece of advice for enjoying this book: I listened to it on audiobook, and I’ve discovered that I tend to pay better attention to stories than intellectual discourse in audiobook format. If you’re anything like me, you may want to read a paperback or e-book. You’ll want to highlight dozens of passages anyway!
    • 5/5
      I expected this book to be academic essays into the plight of southern Black citizens. Instead, I found flowing prose and descriptive narratives to recount his travels and share the struggles of "Black people." I especially found the story of his son touching. It is no wonder this has become a classic.
    • 5/5
      One of the great enduring concepts: "double-consciousness."
    • 5/5
      One of the toughest, most interesting non-fiction reads I've experienced.The Souls of Black Folk was required reading for me this year - although the class only dealt with five or so chapters, I was so intrigued by what I was reading that I had to finish the entire book.Each essay provided plenty of food for thought - but most interesting to me was the essay on the education of former slaves - what was appropriate and what was not. This is a part of history that really hasn't been part of my education, and not only did I find it enlightening, historically speaking, I also found it to be relevant today - for all types. With our focus on getting straight into college after high school (and my experience with some siblings that just doesn't work for), I think what Du Bois has to say is incredibly insightful. Not every person is cut out for a life of academia after high school, and specialized training is there for a reason. As I attend school, and each semester say goodbye to more and more friends who just, for whatever reason, are not coming back, I find myself thinking more about the ideas that Du Bois so eloquently writes down.I recommend this reading. I think everyone should read it - and I challenge you to do so.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful and true book. It is written in a strange, Victorian manner, which was probably the only way it could be published. But the stories of blacks in America are terrific and there is no denying that DuBois was something of a genius. His analysis of what the blacks gave to this country jibes with other books that I have read: music, clearing the land, and the Spirit. He is kinder than I would be to the idiotic white people of the south.