The Gift of Black Folk The Negroes in the Making of America W.E.B. DuBois

ISBN: 978-0-7570-0319-6 Length: 224 Pages Size: 6 X 9-inch Format: Quality Paperback Category: History/African-American Studies Price: $14.95 US Availability: In Print Click below for: Synopsis • Contents Foreword • Reviews

Synopsis

A gifted writer, scholar, sociologist, historian, and activist, W.E.B. DuBois was one of the founding fathers of the US Civil Rights movement. In 1924, during the height of the country’s Black Renaissance, he produced a remarkable history of African-Americans--The Gift of Black Folk. Commissioned by the Knights of Columbus, this work represents one of the first insider’s views of the black experience in America. In it, DuBois detailed the role of blacks in the early exploration of America; the roles they played in cultivating tobacco, cotton, sweet potatoes, and peanuts; and the courage they displayed in fighting wars. He documented their creative genius in music, painting, sculpture, literature, theatre, and in virtually every aspect of American culture. He discussed the unique contribution of black women in caring for and nurturing white children as well as their own. He proposed the idea that freedom for black women could lead to freedom for all women.

DuBois also looked at the crucial contribution of blacks to the development of democracy, stating that "one cannot think . . . of democracy in the modern world without reference to the American Negro." The United States cannot be understood apart from race because it was the presence of black slaves in America that forced the country to ask whether it would attempt to live up to its ideal of freedom for all people. DuBois made it clear that "the Negro Problem" remained the problem for the future of democracy and the United States. He stressed the fact that the black man’s bounteous gifts to the nation were present even before the shackles of physical slavery were removed. The black way of life had influenced the mind of the nation, and African spiritual values had become an increasingly evident part of the white man’s psyche. "The black laborer brought the idea of toil as a necessary evil ministering to the pleasure of life."

At a time when the United States prepares to welcome its first African-American president, The Gift of Black Folk provides a unique picture of the struggles that paved the way for freedom and equality in our nation.

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He graduated in 1888 from Fisk University, a black institution in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1895, he became the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard University. DuBois was an early exponent of full equality for African-Americans; in 1905, he became a cofounder of the Niagara Movement, which became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

From 1897 to 1910, DuBois taught economics and history at Atlanta University. In 1910, he became editor of the influential NAACP magazine, Crisis; it was a position he held until 1934. That year, he resigned over the question of voluntary segregation, which he had come to favor over integration, and returned to Atlanta University, where he taught until 1944. His concern for the liberation of blacks throughout the world led him to organize the first of several Pan-African Congresses (Paris, 1919). In 1945, at the Fifth Congress in Manchester, England, he met with African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. After being disillusioned with the slow progress of civil rights in the U.S., DuBois became a member of the American Communist party in 1961. During the last two years of his life, he lived in Ghana. He died in 1963.

Contents

Foreword
Prescript

1. The Black Explorers
2. Black Labor
3. Black Soldiers
4. The Emancipation of Democracy
5. The Reconstruction of Freedom
6. The Freedom of Womanhood
7. The American Folk Song
8. Negro Art and Literature
9. The Gift of the Spirit

About the Author
Index

Foreword

It is not uncommon for casual thinkers to assume that the United States of America is practically a continuation of English nationality. Our speech is English and the English played so large a part in our beginnings that it is easy to fall more or less consciously into the thought that the history of this nation has been but a continuation and development of these beginnings. A little reflection, however, quickly convinces us that at least there was present French influence in the Mississippi Valley and Spanish influence in the Southeast and Southwest. Everything else however that has been added to the American nationality is often looked upon as a sort of dilution of more or less doubtful value: peoples that had to be assimilated as far as possible and made over to the original and basic type. Thus we continually speak of Germans and Scandinavians, of Irish and Jews, Poles, Austrians and Hungarians; and, with few exceptions, we regard the coming of the Negroes as an unmitigated error and a national liability.

It is high time that this course of our thinking should be changed. America is conglomerate. This is at once her problem and her glory--perhaps indeed her sole and greatest reason for being. Her physical foundation is not English and while it is primarily it is not entirely European. It represents peculiarly a coming together of the peoples of the world. American institutions have been borrowed from England and France in the main, but with contributions from many and widely scattered groups. American history has no prototype and has been developed from the various racial elements. Despite the fact that our mother tongue is called English we have developed an American speech with its idiosyncrasies and idioms, a speech whose purity is not to be measured by its conformity to the speech of the British Isles. And finally the American spirit is a new and interesting result of divers, threads of thought, and feeling, coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa.

This essay is an attempt to set forth more clearly than has hitherto been done the effect which the Negro has had upon American life. Its thesis is that despite slavery, war and caste, and despite our present Negro problem, the American Negro is and has been a distinct asset to this country and has brought a contribution without which America could not have been; and that perhaps the essence of our so-called Negro problem is the failure to recognize this fact and to continue to act as though the Negro was what we once imagined and wanted to imagine him--a representa-tive of a subhuman species fitted only for subordination.

A moment’s thought will easily convince open–minded persons that the contribution of the Negro-to-American nationality as slave, freedman and citizen was far from negligible. No element in American life has so subtly and yet clearly woven itself into the warp and woof of our thinking and acting as the American Negro. He came with the first explorers and helped in exploration. His labor was–from the first–the foundation of the American prosperity and the cause of the rapid growth of the new world in economic and social importance. Modern democracy rests not simply on the striving white men in Europe and America but also on the persistent struggle of the black men in America for two centuries. The military defense of this land has depended upon Negro soldiers from the time of the Colonial wars down to the struggle of the World War. Not only does the Negro appear, reappear and persist in American literature but a Negro American literature has arisen of deep significance, and Negro folk lore and music are among the choicest heritages of this land.

Finally the Negro had played a peculiar spiritual role in America as a sort of living, breathing test of our ideals and an example of the faith, hope, and tolerance of our religion.

Reviews

to come

BACK TO TOP OF PAGE