W.E.B. Du Bois on African American literature

Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the foremost leaders of the radical protest movement among African Americans in the early decades of the 20th century. A founding member of the NAACP in 1909, Du Bois served for nearly 25 years as editor of its magazine, The Crisis, an important venue for the clutch of black writers whose cultural and political thought influenced the nascent civil rights movement. Although Du Bois’s political involvements have largely defined his legacy, in his time he was a respected author and historian of literature as well. In his best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he drew on both his academic background in sociology and his literary talents to articulate the social and psychological contours of the experience of blacks living in white America. The following excerpt—taken from a much longer article on American literature, published in 1926 in the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica—is guided by an interest in those authors who took ownership of that experience, thereby giving rise to a unique and powerful literary tradition.

The plight of the Africans brought to America during the slave trade and of their descendants is one of the most dramatic in human history. That there should arise a literature written by black Americans touching their own situation depended on many things—their education, their economic condition, their growth in group consciousness. Before 1910, the books written by American Negroes were with some exceptions either a part of the general American literature or individual voices of Americans of Negro descent.

There began, however, about 1910 something that can be called a renaissance. It came because of oppression, because the spread of education made self-expression possible, and because a larger number of these 10,000,000 people were raising themselves above the lowest poverty. The first sign of this renaissance was naturally a continuation of the self-revelations current during the abolition controversy in the slave narratives, of which Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times (1892) was the most striking and Booker Washington’s Up from Slavery, published in 1901, the last great example. Since 1910, other autobiographies have followed. In these later stories there is, of course, less of the older spontaneity, little of adventure and more self-consciousness. John R. Lynch published his revealing Facts of Reconstruction in 1913. Alexander Walters (a black bishop), R.R. Moton (the successor of Booker Washington) and many others published autobiographies.

A more careful consideration of the Negro’s social problems has characterised the period 1910–26. This is perhaps best illustrated by the three or four volumes of essays published by Kelley Miller, the trenchant work of William Pickens, W.E.B. DuBois’s Darkwater (1920), and J.A. Rogers’s From Superman to Man (1917), and especially by the files of the growing weekly Negro press. These general considerations have led to a number of scientific studies. Foremost among these are the series of Atlanta University studies covering 13 years and touching such matters as Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1910); The College-Bred Negro American (1911); The Common School and the Negro American (1912); The Negro American Artisan (1913); Morals and Manners among Negro Americans (1915). There came also as a result of the Chicago riot the careful study of The Negro in Chicago (Illinois-Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1922). The Tuskegee Negro Year Book, edited by M.N. Work annually since 1915, and the work of Dr. George E. Haynes have been along the same lines.

More striking work, however, begins with the rewriting of American history from the Negro point of view. The doyen of this effort since 1910 has been Carter G. Woodson, whose work has been prolific and painstaking. Beginning with 1916 he has published a considerable number of books, including the Journal of Negro History, 10 large volumes filled with documents, essays and research. Next comes Benjamin G. Brawley with his Short History of the American Negro (1913 and 1919), Social History of the American Negro (1921) and his study of The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1921). With these may be noted Steward’s The Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1804 (1914), Emmett J. Scott’s The American Negro in the World War (1919) and The Gift of Black Folk: the Negroes in the Making of America (1924), by W.E.B. DuBois, published by the Knights of Columbus.

But not in propaganda, science nor history has the essence of the renaissance shown itself. Rather the true renaissance has been a matter of the spirit and has shown itself among the poets as well as among the novelists and dramatists. In poetry, there are a dozen or more writers whose output has been small but significant. George McClellan, with his somewhat didactic and conventional verse, froms the link between past and present. Then comes James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Leslie Hill, Joseph Cotter, Jr., Georgia Douglas Johnson, Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes, besides a half-dozen others. It is notable that already several critical anthologies (by James Weldon Johnson, Robert Kerlin, White and Jackson) have appeared. William Stanley Braithwaite has appeared as a widely read critic of poetry. The development in fiction is still newer and includes some earlier attempts like The Quest of the Silver Fleece by W.E.B. DuBois (1911) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), and newer and more significant work by Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Fauset, Walter White and Jean Toomer. In the drama, Willis Richardson and one or two others have been writing effectively, while in the explanation and collection of Negro music and folk-lore we have J. Rosamond Johnson, T.W. Talley and J.W. Cotter.

Perhaps the extent of this renaissance of Negro literature can be summed up in two works. One is the 15 volumes of The Crisis magazine, which began publication in Nov. 1910, and has since been a compendium of occurrences, thoughts and expression among American Negroes. Most of the newer Negro writers found first publication in its pages. The second is the book called The New Negro, published in 1925 and edited by Alain Locke, in which some 30 contemporary Negro writers express the spirit of their day. All these things are beginnings rather than fulfilments, but they are significant beginnings. They mean much for the future.