2130_American Lit Module 1 _W.E.B. Du Bois
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Learn more about this author and her times. Source: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Short Volumne
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2130_American Lit Module 1 _W.E.B. Du Bois
- 1. W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company W. E. B. Du Bois
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Biography of W. E. B. Du Bois • Born in Massachusetts in 1868 • First African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University • Published pioneering works in sociology, including The Souls of Black Folk (1903) • Co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People • Spent the final years of his life in Ghana, advocating for Pan-African causes
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company W. E. B. Du Bois
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company W. E. B. Du Bois
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company W. E. B. Du Bois
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Souls of Black Folk
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Souls of Black Folk “[T]he Negro is . . . gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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.” (continued on next slide)
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Souls of Black Folk “One ever feels his two-ness,—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. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Souls of Black Folk “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs [spirituals composed by African American slaves],—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past.”
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Souls of Black Folk “It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.”
- 12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- 13. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett • Born to slave parents in Mississippi in 1862 • Orphaned at age 16; raised her five siblings by working as a teacher • As a journalist she advocated for women’s rights and for an end to lynching • Helped to found the NAACP • Worked closely with Jane Addams, a prominent suffragist
- 14. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- 15. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- 16. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “Mob Rule in New Orleans” “Capt. Day started for Charles’ room. As soon as Charles got sight of him there was a flash, a report, and Day fell dead in his tracks. In another instant Charles was standing in the door, and seeing Patrolman Peter J. Lamb, he drew his gun and Lamb fell dead.”
- 17. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “Mob Rule in New Orleans” “There were no valuables in his room, and if he was a professional thief he had his headquarters for storing his plunder at some other place than his room on Fourth street. Nothing was found in his room that could lead to the belief that he was a thief, except fifty or more small bits of soap . . . His wearing apparel was little more than rags, and financially he was evidently not in a flourishing condition.”
- 18. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Editor's Notes
- W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett are two of the most important writers and activists from a period in African American history that scholars refer to as “the nadir” (meaning “lowest point”). Despite the fact that it was a time when African Americans had won their freedom from slavery, the post–Civil War period was also the era of Jim Crow laws, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the lynching of black men and women. Du Bois and Wells-Barnett worked to guide African Americans through an extremely difficult time, and their writings are evidence of “what the critic Warner Berthoff has called ‘the literature of argument—writings in sociology, philosophy, and psychology impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform” (NAAL 8).
- W. E. B. Du Bois in the office of The Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was the editor and founder of The Crisis and one of the founding members of the NAACP.
- It is difficult to overstate the importance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s life and legacy to African American, American, and Pan-African culture. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that Du Bois was “one of the most remarkable men of our time.” Du Bois’s greatest academic contributions were in the field of sociology, including such books as The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Negro Problem (1903), and Black Reconstruction (1935). His most famous work—an interdisciplinary book that is equal parts literature, sociology, history, musicology, and public policy—is The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which is discussed at length in later slides.
- Du Bois was an undergraduate at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee (pictured here is Jubilee Hall, ca. 1900). Du Bois left Fisk in 1888 and went on to Harvard University, where he finished his bachelor’s degree in 1890. He went on to attend the University of Berlin in Germany for graduate work and returned to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. His first teaching job was at Wilberforce University in Ohio (another historically black college). He was also affiliated with the University of Philadelphia, Clark Atlanta University, and The New School in New York City.
- Du Bois was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, which was the first intercollegiate African American fraternity. Pictured here is a banquet at Howard University in 1932; Du Bois is at the center in the light-colored suit.
- The Niagara Movement, which Du Bois co-founded with William Monroe Trotter in 1905, was the first organization to seek full political and economic rights for African Americans at a national level. By 1910, the organization led to the founding of the NAACP. Pictured here are the Niagara Movement founders in 1905. (Their first meeting took place at Niagara Falls, one of the reasons for the name “Niagara Movement.”)
- Du Bois’s most famous work—and the one that attracts the most attention from students of American literature—is The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Of particular interest to literature scholars is the way in which Du Bois makes art, music, and literature an integral part of his political and sociological critique. How would students describe an overall strategy of The Souls of Black Folk, the discernment, in the lines of supposedly simple African American spirituals, of complex ideas of selfhood and self-fulfillment? Is this a writerly tour de force, a display of wit, mental agility, and (perhaps) late Victorian sentimentality by one author working in a mainstream tradition? Or does Du Bois make this venture into cultural anthropology ring true and convince us of the deep wisdom within the ordinary and the plain? Wikimedia Commons
- One of the most important ideas to come out of The Souls of Black Folk is the notion of “double-consciousness,” which Du Bois lays out in the first chapter and which is reproduced on this and the following slide. Begin your discussion of this excerpt with your students by having them define the negative and positive aspects of double-consciousness. Help them to understand that Du Bois considered double-consciousness to be as much a blessing as a curse. What do African Americans gain from the “second-sight” of double-consciousness? What do they lose from “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”? Is double-consciousness the opposite of self-consciousness? Is it something paradoxically less and more than self-consciousness?
- Continued from previous slide. After discussing the questions on the previous slide with your students, read with them the text that follows this excerpt: “In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” What is the model for personal identity that Du Bois lays out here? What is the model for social justice?
- As an epigraph to each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois includes an excerpt from a poem (often by a white European or American author) and a bar of music from what he refers to as “the Sorrow Songs” (spirituals composed by African American slaves). What are the connections between the song selections that open each chapter and the lines of poetry? How are these pairings an example of double-consciousness? How are they an example of his statement that, as an African American, “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world”?
- If the long conceit about the “mountain path to Canaan” returns the reader to the familiar imaginative territory of the Calvinist and evangelical traditions, how has Du Bois prepared us to accept this old (and perhaps time-worn) analogy as something relevant and fresh?
- This 1897 photograph of Wells-Barnett was taken after she had published her first two anti-lynching pamphlets: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (1892) and A Red Record (1894). By this point, Wells-Barnett was a respected advocate for women’s rights and for the end of lynching. Wikimedia Commons
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s biography reveals an amazing American life. She was born into slavery less than a year before the Emancipation Proclamation to hardworking parents (a carpenter and a cook) who did everything they could to support their family of eight children. When Ida was 16, however, both of her parents and two of her siblings died of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. Ida was determined to keep the family together and raised her surviving five siblings with the occasional help of her aunt. After moving to Memphis in 1884 to attend college (at Shaw and later Fisk University), she was asked to give up her seat on a train to a white man and sit in a “Jim Crow” car. Like Rosa Parks, however, she refused. She wrote about the experience in Christian and African-American newspapers across the country. This began her career as a journalist and an advocate for such causes as women’s rights and the end to lynching. It is as an anti-lynching advocate that she is most well known, and the selection in NAAL, “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” is one such example of her ability to chronicle the atrocities of lynching for the American public.
- Note: Some of your students may find the image in this slide disturbing. Be sensitive to those students as you prepare this presentation. This is a photograph of a crowd of white men surrounding two African American men hanging from nooses on a pole with their shirts torn down to their waists (late 19th or early 20th century). Wells-Barnett was a tireless advocate against lynching, which took place with increasing frequency in the years leading up to the twentieth century. Between 1882 and 1968, approximately 3,500 African Americans were murdered by lynch mobs. In 1892 alone—the year when Wells-Barnett published her pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases—approximately 160 African Americans were lynched. (To put that in perspective, that works out to be approximately three people lynched every week for an entire year.)
- This is a late-19th-century photograph of four African American women, exhibited by W .E .B. du Bois in the Paris Exposition of 1900. Wells-Barnett was also an advocate for women’s suffrage. “She participated in national suffragist marches and, with Jane Addams, founder of the social settlement Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side, she successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.” (NAAL 837–838). Their partnership reflected the way women, white and black, worked together for social reform.
- The full title of this selection is “Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics,” which Wells-Barnett published as a pamphlet in Chicago in 1900. Robert Charles was an African American resident of New Orleans who shot (but did not kill) a white police officer after he and his friend had been harassed by the officers for loitering in a predominantly white neighborhood. The manhunt for Charles devolved into a riot that left twenty-eight people dead, including Charles. Even after Charles was killed by the police, rioting continued as white mobs attacked and lynched African Americans and burned “the best Negro schoolhouse in Louisiana” to the ground. Discuss with your students the rhetorical (and literary) tactics that Wells-Barnett uses to condemn the mob violence against African Americans. In the section beginning with “Captain Day started for Charles’ room” (the first two sentences of which appear on this slide), Wells moves into mordant sarcasm, always a difficult undertaking on the printed page. How does that tone come clear? What are the cues that we are not supposed to take this paragraph “straight”? Does the context, the many paragraphs preceding this one, do most of the work of establishing the voice? Are there rhetorical strategies in the paragraph itself that provide a sufficient cue as to how to hear it?
- Toward the end of the selection, Wells-Barnett centers on the worldly effects that Robert Charles left behind, especially the published materials in his room. What does she find there, and why does she accord it so much importance?