The Souls of Black Folk

"W.E.B. Du Bois, born in Massachusetts, educated at Harvard and in Germany, cast his lot with Black Southerners by moving to Atlanta and relays what he saw here. It’s a series of vignettes. The writing is so powerful. From the perspective of the white people in Atlanta, he’s no different from the people who’ve been held in 250 years of slavery. He tells a heartbreaking story of when his young son dies in Georgia. He’s walking down the street, with his heartbroken young wife, imagining white people’s disdain for them. He refuses to have his son buried in what he calls the “strangely red” earth of Georgia. It is Southern history, but it’s also a reflection on the history that shaped what followed its publication in 1903. It is important for its testimony but also for the work on Reconstruction that Du Bois began with this book. He then writes a great book in the 1930s called Black Reconstruction in which he argues that Reconstruction, which was widely considered a failure, showed the promise of a society in which Black people had the opportunity to succeed independently. The Souls of Black Folks is literally pivotal. People call the South ‘the Bible Belt.’ The South is deeply identified with Black and white evangelical Christianity . Enslaved people were not eager to adopt Christianity until evangelicalism took root, in the late 18th century. Evangelicalism conveyed two things: One, all people are equal in the eyes of God and all people can have salvation through Jesus Christ. Two, the people who suffer the most get special favor in the great beyond. Black people rushed to that message. Then, white Southerners took the message of the Bible and twisted it so slavery was a path toward salvation. You have the paradox of Christianity being both the explanation for why slavery is just, and a great resource for people in slavery. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King taps into that evangelical tradition, pride, patience and determination to launch the Civil Rights Movement. Some argued, like Du Bois, that the Black church was focused too much on eternal salvation and not enough on secular rights. The great accomplishment of Dr. King was to make the church an engine of Black liberation."