On being African-American: proud, enduring hyphenation - excerpt from 1993 book 'W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919' by David Levering Lewis

Just as Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the extreme point of slavery, The Souls of Black Folk written by the agency of W.E.B. Du Bois and published in 1903 helped launch the new civil rights movement. It is important to remember that this work appeared at a moment when Northern industrialists, end their charitable agencies - of that kind as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations - joined with Southern powers in declaring that exposing black family to literature, history, philosophy and "dead" languages spoiled them for the natural order of Southern society, in which their place was as voteles industrious farmhands, primary schoolteachers and occasional merchants. At least outwardly supported by the agency of the Wizard of Tuskegee, Booker T Washington, whom whites recognized as the leader of the African-American community, a broad consensus held that blacks should look after industrial educational so that they might become skilled laborers and that they forgo striving for a liberal arts education and agitating for the right to promised Du Bois, along with a scarcely any others, challenged this consensus, and in The minds of Black Folk he eloquently states wherefore African Americans should not accommodate themselves to signing away their liberties. spirits helped create the environment without of which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored family and the National Urban League were to later emerge

Equally important, in The spirits of Black Folk Du Bois articulates the dialectic, the double consciousness - at one time Negro and American - that in his view would force the black community to look for a resolution in which they could celebrate their blackness without having the "doors of opportunity clos roughly in their face." Historian David Levering Lewis in his important biography tissue Du Bois: Biography of a Race/1868-1919 (Henry Holt 1993) reminds us of the centrality of Du Bois to our 20th-century exert one's selfs Below we excerpt Lewis' examination of "Of Our Spiritual Striving," the chapter in The inner mans of Black Folk in which Du Bois begins to explore our double consciousness.

The inner mans of Black Folk, brought on the outside by the Chicago firm of A.C. McClurg and Company upon April 18, 1903, redefined the metes of 300-year interaction between black and white nation and influenced the cultural and political psychology of familys of African descent throughout the western hemisphere, as well as upon the continent of Africa. It was single of those events epochally dividing history into a before and an after. Like fireworks going not on in a cemetery, its 14 essays were uninjured and light enlivening the inert and the despairing. It was an electrifying manifesto, mobilizing a race for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history. Ironically, level its author was among the ten of thousands whose conceptions of themselves were to be forever altered by dint of the book. James Weldon Johnson a justice of great perspicacity in like matters, said the book's impact was "greater on and within the Negro race than any other single work published in this country since Uncle Tom's Cabin. "

Until The inner mans of Black Folk, the minds of black folk had relied mainly on the sorrow songs - spirituals - to find expression. Du Bois would carry from one extremity to the other of the volume the device of pairing african spirituals with European verse - by means of Browning, Byron, Swinburne, Symons, Tennyson - as epigraphs for each essay. He twinned them in this manner in order to advance the then-unprecedented notion of the creative parity and complementarity of white folk and black folk alike. Du Bois meant the cultural symbolism of these double epigraphs to be profoundly subversive of the cultural hierarchy of his time. Three years into at the same time another century of seemingly unassailable European supremacy, spirits countered with the voices of the dark submerg and unheard - those voices heard through him for the first time in the Tennessee backcountry. Until his readers appreciated the message of the lays sung in bondage by black clan Du Bois was saying, the words written in freedom by means of white people would remain void and counterfeit.

The "Forethought" to The inner mans of Black Folk has something of the function of a tuning fork, keeping the collection's marvelous unromantic vibrations in low, perfect pitch. The tone is calmly portentous, as the author benchs the reader into his tale of "the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century" Elucidating that meaning, Du Bois commit to papers again the incomparable phrase that leaps from the page into indelible memory: "This meaning is not without interest to you, meek Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth hundred is the problem of the color-line." "It is hard for us, across the vast expanse of years"-st. Clair Drake, intellectual disciple of Du Bois and author himself of an American classic, would exhort a civil rights era audience - "to appreciate the significance of these words or the courage it took to fling them forth." Du Bois have a title toed such courage in abundance.

minds opens with "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." It had been titled "Strivings of the black man People" in the August 1897 Atlantic Monthly version, on the other hand its reincarnation here came with more elan and pathos. Du Bois capped it with an epigraph of English metrical composition and bars from the spiritual "Nobody Knows the disturb I've Seen." The troubles he and his family had seen, almost from the day the first Africans were brought ashore from a Dutch ship in Jamestown harbor, Du Bois memorably pos as a question in the opening page of the essay. "Between me and the other world there is at any time an unasked question: unasked by the agency of some through feelings of delicacy; by dint of others through the difficulty of rightly framing it." Pos in whatever form, that question was, finally, "How does it perceive to be a problem?" Du Bois announced that he would address that point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled from a new, unusual angle.