Scholars of African American arts and letters cannot bestow enough distinction on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s 1903 literary classic The Souls of Black Folk. In spite of first appearing in print more than a century ago, this book remains an influential text to critical race theorists and contemporary creators of social, political, and economic policies. Du Bois’s popularization of such concepts as “the color line” and a “double consciousness” have intrigued intellectuals for generations, forming in peoples’ minds absorbing hypotheses and unequivocal pictures of the less than acceptable social conditions in which many Americans lived (and, sadly, continue to live), and an enduring model of the inner, psychological turmoil that too many people experience in racially segregated environments…
And, yet, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, like a jeweler’s elaborate setting for precious stones, famously framed and embraced these memorable watchwords: “for the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois’s pictorial model for “the color line – illuminated as miniature black surveyors in the pages of The Crisis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s official magazine – suggested that Du Bois, too, conceived of America’s race problem in visual, architectonic conceits. On this book’s subliminal visual overtures, one can also excavate and probe the book’s original subtitle, Essays and Sketches; that last word bringing to mind drawings and designs that, in concert with Du Bois’s poetic language and compelling narratives, attempted to reveal “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century.”
“Souls Illustrated” (“Les âmes illustrées: W.E.B. Du Bois dans l’art contemporain”), in The Color Line: Les Artistes Africains-Américains et La Ségrégation, ed., Daniel Soutif (Paris: Flammarion, 2016), 74-85.
