Reading Order
The Souls of Black Folk Reading Order
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the foundational texts of African American intellectual life — a collection of essays, sketches, and a short story that together constitute an argument about the nature of Black experience in post-Reconstruction America and the forms of consciousness that racial oppression produces. Du Bois, who had earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and was one of the most educated men in America, wrote the book partly as a response to Booker T. Washington's accommodationist program (which argued that Black Americans should accept social and political inequality in exchange for economic opportunity) and partly as an attempt to describe from the inside what it means to live as a 'problem' in a society organized against you. The book introduces two of the most influential concepts in African American intellectual history: 'double consciousness' — the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity — and 'the Veil' — the color line that separates Black America from white America and through which Du Bois can see the white world but which prevents the white world from seeing him truly. These concepts have been so thoroughly absorbed into American intellectual life that it is difficult to remember that they had to be invented: Du Bois was describing, for the first time in these terms, the psychological structure of living under racism in a nominally free society, and the accuracy of his description has sustained the book's relevance for more than a century.
Where to start
The Souls of Black Folk — read the Forethought first, then the essays in order; the autobiographical sketch of his son's death ('Of the Passing of the First-Born') is the book's emotional center.
Complete The Souls of Black Folk Book List
- 1Buy
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois·1903·The collection — fourteen essays on double consciousness, the Veil, Reconstruction, Booker T. Washington, and Black cultural life. - 2Buy
Black Reconstruction in America
W.E.B. Du Bois·1935·Du Bois's magnum opus — a Marxist reinterpretation of Reconstruction as a labor movement. - 3Buy
Dusk of Dawn
W.E.B. Du Bois·1940·Du Bois's intellectual autobiography — his concept of race and his lifelong argument with American racism. - 4Buy
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington·1901·Washington's autobiography — the accommodationist position Du Bois was arguing against in The Souls of Black Folk. - 5Buy
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson·1912·Johnson's novel of racial passing — the Veil experienced from the inside. - 6Buy
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass·1845·Douglass's slave narrative — the foundational text of African American autobiography. - 7Buy
Native Son
Richard Wright·1940·Wright's novel of Black life in Chicago — double consciousness rendered as claustrophobic rage. - 8Buy
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin·1963·Baldwin's essays on race — Du Bois's double consciousness updated for the civil rights era.
The Souls of Black Folk — Frequently Asked Questions
What is W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness?
Double consciousness is Du Bois's term, introduced in The Souls of Black Folk, for the psychological condition of African Americans living in a racist society: 'a 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.' The condition produces a 'twoness' — being at once American and Black, unable to merge these two identities into a single, whole self because American society refuses to recognize the Black American as fully American. Du Bois's concept has been enormously influential in African American intellectual life and in the broader social sciences, anticipating by decades the concepts of code-switching and internalized racism that contemporary psychology has developed.
What is Du Bois's argument against Booker T. Washington?
Du Bois's central argument in The Souls of Black Folk is that Booker T. Washington's program — which accepted political disenfranchisement, civil inferiority, and withdrawal of higher education in exchange for emphasis on industrial training and economic development — was both strategically wrong and morally corrupting. Du Bois argued that the vote, civil rights, and higher education for the talented tenth of the Black community were not luxuries but prerequisites for any meaningful economic advancement; that without political power, Black Americans would remain at the mercy of white economic interests regardless of their economic development; and that Washington's accommodationism reinforced the white South's belief that Black Americans did not deserve full citizenship. The debate between Du Bois and Washington — broadly, between civil rights militancy and economic accommodationism — shaped African American political thought for the first half of the twentieth century.
What is the Veil in The Souls of Black Folk?
The Veil is Du Bois's metaphor for the color line that separates Black America from white America — the barrier of race that prevents genuine mutual recognition. Through the Veil, Du Bois can see the white world clearly (he is educated in its institutions, trained in its intellectual traditions) but the white world cannot see him truly (it sees only his race, not his individuality). The Veil also operates within the Black community: Du Bois uses it to describe the isolation of Black intellectual life, the way in which the color line distorts Black consciousness and produces the striving toward whiteness that he sees as a symptom of oppression rather than aspiration. The Veil's most devastating effect is described in the essay 'Of the Passing of the First-Born', where Du Bois describes the death of his infant son and reflects that the child has passed behind the Veil beyond the suffering that awaited him as a Black American.
Is The Souls of Black Folk fiction or nonfiction?
The Souls of Black Folk is primarily a collection of essays and sketches — nonfiction — but it includes one work of fiction ('Of the Coming of John', a short story about a Black man who returns South after education in the North) and blurs the line between personal essay, sociology, history, and autobiography throughout. Du Bois opens each chapter with both a poem and a bar of music from the sorrow songs (African American spirituals), connecting the intellectual argument to the cultural tradition that produced it. The book is best understood as a literary-intellectual hybrid — part political argument, part cultural history, part autobiography, part fiction — and this formal complexity is itself part of its argument: Du Bois is demonstrating the richness of Black intellectual and cultural life at the very moment he is arguing for its recognition.
What should I read after The Souls of Black Folk?
After The Souls of Black Folk, readers typically move through Du Bois's other major works: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), his Marxist reinterpretation of Reconstruction as a labor movement, and Dusk of Dawn (1940), his intellectual autobiography. For the debate Du Bois was entering, Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) provides the opposing position. The tradition Du Bois helped establish runs through James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925), James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. For Du Bois's concept of double consciousness in novelistic form, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the clearest literary expression of the idea.
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