The Souls of Black Folk summary

There’s no question that slavery was an incredibly sinister time in American history. For many years, African Americans hoped that emancipation would mean the end of their suffering. But it wasn’t to be. When freedom came, it just introduced new adversities. 

When slavery was finally abolished in the mid-1860s, it left behind deep scars and the overwhelming task of successfully integrating black people into American society. 

These blinks give insight into a key African American activist’s views on the magnitude of the task at hand, the lives of African Americans at the time, and the many challenges they faced – internally and externally. 

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• which prominent black leader Du Bois disagreed with;
• how farmers in the South had the odds stacked against them; and
• how Black and White Americans interacted after slavery.

As we’ve learned, a significant conundrum in the years after slavery was how to help African Americans become fully-fledged citizens who were respected and treated equally. 

Booker T. Washington, an influential Black leader at the time, proposed a solution to this issue. He encouraged Black people to accept discrimination and focus instead on learning practical skills. These skills would help them get jobs in the new industrial economy, gain material wealth, and, as a result, garner the respect of their White counterparts. And according to Washington, this respect would eventually lead to equal status for African Americans.

But Du Bois strongly disagreed with this idea. 

The key message here is: The focus on industrial education was a compromise that disadvantaged African Americans.

Du Bois saw Washington’s proposal as an inadequate compromise. It only served the commercial interests of White people in the North and South, while pushing aside the difficult conversation of African American civil rights. By abandoning the fight against discrimination and focusing on manual work, he believed that African Americans were accepting the idea that they were second class citizens. 

Not only that, Du Bois also viewed Washington’s idea of giving up the fight for civil rights as contradictory and short-sighted in many ways. 

Without civil rights, African American workers and property owners wouldn’t be treated fairly. By allowing themselves to be discriminated against, they would gradually become discouraged and lose self-respect. And as for focusing on basic education and industrial training, this ignored the fact that different people have different skills and capabilities. In Du Bois’s opinion, it made no sense to make every Black person a manual worker when many were more suited to leading, teaching, thinking, or the arts. 

Lastly, Du Bois objected to Booker T. Washington on the grounds that his idea left the work of advancing the African American population solely to African Americans. 

Du Bois believed that moving past the legacies of slavery was impossible without support from the White population. And by encouraging Black people to work and earn their way to equality, Washington was, to some extent, taking responsibility away from the American nation as a whole. The only way to achieve equality in America was for Black people to actively, but peacefully, demand the same treatment, opportunities, and rights as their White counterparts. 

To paint a picture of what life was like for African Americans after slavery ended, Du Bois uses the example of a county in the Black Belt. 

This southern region was originally named after its dark, fertile soil. Thousands of Black people were brought here to work on its cotton plantations; by the end of slavery, the population had reached half a million. Many former enslaved people remained in the Black Belt after abolition – but freedom didn’t mean an easy life for them.

The key message here is: After slavery ended, most African Americans in the South farmed on borrowed land and lived in terrible conditions.

Many Black people returned to farm work; in the county that Du Bois studied, over 88 percent of the population were farmers. But because little was done to help them acquire land after slavery, they rented plots from White landowners in exchange for a portion of their crops. Often, they also couldn’t afford seeds, equipment, or even food and clothes to sustain them until the harvest. So, these items were bought on credit. 

Black farmers were also limited in which crops they could grow. Despite the rich soil suited to a variety of produce, cotton was the only crop grown on two-thirds of the land. Why? Well, cotton was very valuable and, as a result, it was the only form of payment that most landowners and merchants accepted. 

Now, it’s not uncommon – or even unfair – to demand rent for the use of a property. But in the case of Black farmers in the South, this system was rigged in ways that kept them in debt and prevented them from advancing. 

In the absence of slavery, landowners and merchants saw debt as a way of keeping the Black population working. So, in many instances, an increase in the value of cotton meant an increase in a farmer’s rent. And if a farmer had a large harvest one year, his rent was increased the following year.

In addition to toiling away for little profit, the housing conditions of most Black farmers in the Black Belt region were appalling. They and their families either lived in old plantation cabins or in new structures built on the same sites. The majority of these were run-down and had only one or two rooms, resulting in overcrowding.

Faced with these desperate homes and a crippling debt system, the farmers had only two options. They could either find ways to buy their own land – something only an incredibly small fraction managed to do. Or, they could move closer to towns in search of better opportunities.

Throughout America’s history, Black and White people have been separated in one way or another.

Over time, these boundaries have softened. But immediately after slavery, particularly in the South, the lines separating the races were highly visible. And these lines meant different things in different spheres of life.

The key message here is: In the decades after slavery, there weren’t many opportunities for positive interactions between African Americans and their White counterparts.

Firstly, Black and White people in the South lived very much apart, even when they were in close proximity to each other. In some cases, Black and White communities stood side by side, separated by a street; in other cases, one community was surrounded by another. But however they were organized, it was always easy to distinguish where a White or Black community started and ended.

Du Bois made an interesting observation in these patterns of separation: Black and White communities of the same social class rarely had any close contact. The poorest Black communities were often found near well-off White neighborhoods, while more affluent Black people were close to poor White communities. This, according to Du Bois, meant that Black and White people were mostly exposed to the worst of each other.

When it came to economic opportunities, the two races were also separated. On one side were African Americans, many of whom slavery had left extremely unprepared for any other work. This made it difficult for them to compete for jobs, especially when White employers favored their own race. On the other side were White people who, through discrimination or outright unfair methods, took advantage of Black people who didn’t know any better.

For example, Du Bois shares the story of a Black man who was tricked into paying for a farm three times. In the end, the landowner took both the money and the title deed, leaving him with nothing. Because of this unfair landscape, Black people could only progress so far economically.

Black people were similarly disadvantaged in the political sphere. Both Black and White people had the right to vote and take part in politics, but only White people could freely do this. 

For Black people, exercising these rights was made difficult by bribes, election rigging, and even violent coercion. These and many other tactics were used to suppress Black voters and their right to choose leaders who would look out for them. Considering all this, it’s not surprising that many Black people began to see politics as a dirty game and opted not to take part at all. 

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Religion is the opium of the people?” 

Attributed to the German philosopher Karl Marx, it’s often used to describe how religion helps people tolerate suffering and injustice. 

But in the case of the African American church, religion wasn’t just a source of comfort. From the time of slavery, all the way through emancipation and its aftermath, the church was an important organization that mirrored the changing conditions of African Americans.

The key message here is: Like its followers, the African American church has been caught between resisting racial injustices and accepting them.

During slavery, the bible’s teachings on submission as well as its promise of peace in the afterlife encouraged enslaved people to endure their suffering. But in the northern states, where slavery was abolished much earlier than in the South, religious preachers and their churches took a different stance. They preached against slavery. There, the African American church became a part of the abolitionist movement. 

In the years after slavery which, as we’ve learned, held many disappointments for Black people, the church became the center of Black social life. Here, they could freely express themselves, they had caring and influential leaders in the form of preachers, and there was a clear sense of right and wrong. 

Du Bois saw these religious spaces as embodying all the things that African Americans were being denied in their everyday lives; it made sense that churches were so prominent. He points out that in the year 1890, there were around 24,000 Black churches in the United States – that’s one church for every 60 Black families.

But as much as African American churches positively impacted the lives of their congregations, they also faced a critical issue. The struggles that Black people faced as a race cast an inescapable shadow. The result of this was the emergence of two extreme options for Black churches: they could either encourage bold and active resistance or preach quiet submission.

In Du Bois’s opinion, Black churches found themselves wavering in between these extremes. Some simply worshipped in the same way that their White counterparts did, while other churches provided social and economic opportunities, and encouraged perseverance. But despite this, he believed that Black churches and their millions of followers comprised a great force that could one day direct its efforts toward addressing racial injustice and inequality.

Being both Black and American after slavery affected more than the practical aspects of African American lives. It also had a psychological impact on the way Black people saw themselves. 

Du Bois first realized this as a child when a White classmate refused to accept his visiting card. At that moment, he understood that he was on the side of a world in which he didn’t belong, and whose inhabitants saw him as inferior. 

The key message here is: In striving for freedom and civil rights, Black Americans have been fighting to resolve a violent internal conflict.

As an adult, Du Bois used the idea of a veil to describe the separation between the two worlds. 

The veil prevented White people from seeing Black people as fellow humans, and Black people from disassociating themselves from negative ideas of Blackness. Existing between these two worlds leads to a distorted sense of self, and Du Bois considered addressing this distortion as the goal for Black people in America.

For years during slavery, emancipation was seen as the solution to all the struggles that Black people were subjected to. But when it finally came, it brought with it problems of a different sort. From a severe lack of economic prospects to neglect and violence, freedom was far from what many had imagined. 

So, Black Americans turned to other ways of securing dignity and equal status as Americans. These included the right to vote, education, and economical advancement – all while contending with prejudice that insisted Black people didn’t deserve any of these things. But just like the goal of freedom, achieving these milestones didn’t bring the change African Americans hoped for. 

And Du Bois had a theory as to why.

He believed that lifting the veil and achieving equality for African Americans wasn’t a question of reaching one specific goal. The way he saw it, the ideas of freedom, education, training for work, and political power were incomplete and ineffective on their own. Instead, they were parts of a greater goal, all feeding into each other and pushing Black Americans toward a place where they could see themselves without the lens of racism.