The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B DuBois: Chapter 1: Of Our Spiritual Striving - Summary

Black people are regarded as a problem in the United States. DuBois has been aware of his status as a "problem" since a white girl at school refused to interact with him. This causes him to be contemptuous of whites and relish beating them in competition. His contempt fades when he realizes that it is they who have more opportunities than he, and he resolves to attain these opportunities for himself as well. Other blacks were not so competitive but rather subservient, or hateful and angry at whites.

Blacks are only able to see themselves as whites see them, thus having no identity of their own. They are both Negro and American and these identities contradict. The wish of the blacks is to merge these identities into one, and to achieve equality.

There have been powerful black men in history and now that blacks have been emancipated it is time to find that power once more. The seeming weakness of the blacks stems from their contradicting identities. Blacks are ashamed of their simple African background and yet are too poor to immerse themselves in white technology; they both revel in and are ashamed of African song and dance; and so the result is half-hearted failures in art and life.

For two centuries of enslavement, black people dreamed of freedom and regarded freedom as the key to all of their problems. When this was granted however it was sudden and fearful and bewildering. Blacks were not yet truly free, held back by longtime ignorance. They came to the realization that through voting they could hone their freedom. Another advance in their thinking was the realization of the importance of education, and that through education they could challenge white law.

Education took a long time and progress was slow. However it enabled development of self-consciousness and –respect. For the first time the black man saw himself as he was, member of a poor race in a rich country, ignorant. He inherited the shame of bastardy and adultery from whites who took sexual advantage of blacks for generations.

Whites justify prejudice by saying that it is the natural result of the struggle against barbarism, crime and ignorance. Blacks generally meekly accept this. Whites ridicule blacks, willfully ignore their positive sides, but blacks do not despair.

However this prejudice results in the lowering of blacks' ideals. They feel inferior. They feel voting is in vain, and education is in vain, because they believe in white prejudice and perceive the slow progress.

This stress makes blacks doubt the path of "physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands" they are on. And admittedly, each of these is not enough but the combination is the right way for black empowerment. Work, culture and liberty are all needed to attain the goal of the merging of Negro and American identities.

Blacks are in fact the epitome of the American. American culture and fairy tales are based in Africa. America will be richer for accepting Negros instead of mistreating them. So the Negros will continue to persevere in their aspirations toward liberty.

W.E.B DuBois