A Timeless Legacy
Celebrating 100 years of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk
BY KENDRA HAMILTON
Here’s a little known fact worth savoring on the centennial of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk: Its author, the restlessly brilliant and relentlessly controversial Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was at Tuskegee University when the book published, says Dr. Manning Marable, professor of public affairs, political science and history and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.
Those who haven’t read The Souls in a while may not immediately appreciate the richness of the irony. But Du Bois’ slender book of essays and fiction also contained a withering — and nearly unprecedented — critique of Tuskegee University founder Booker T. Washington’s strategy of racial accommodation, a critique that had to have resounded on campus like a thunderclap. In short, Du Bois had made himself “a pariah,” Marable says.
