Things to Consider:

• Booker T. Washington
• Types of Education
• Reconstruction Era
• Early History of Civil Rights Movement
• Connections among the Different Essays that Comprise the Collection

Homework Questions (See Part Two Q's )

Editors' Introduction
xvii:

• Explain:  "The centrality of literacy to a claim of humanity is peculiarly African American" (xvii).  Do you agree with this statement?  Explain.

• What, according to Gates and Oliver, is the significance of the veil metaphor?

• Why does Du Bois identify himself as a Black man?  Does he "need" to "add" this detail?  Explain.

• What is "double-consciousness"? (See also Bruce on p. 240)

• Explain:  "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" (17).

• To what does "forty acres and a mule" (22) refer?

• What was the "Atlanta Compromise"?

• Explain:  "Relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro's degradation" (42).

• Explain the bucket analogy.

• Explain:  "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly" (170).

Editors' Introduction
x:

• Whom did Du Bois consider to be his role model?

• What did Du Bois describe as the "secret of life and the loosing of the color ban" (xii)?

• What did Du Bois believe to be the primary cause of racism?  How did he work to combat this cause?

• Explain:   "Du Bois's move to a position that synthesizes and resolves the failed double solutions of the past echoes his hope for a new Awakening" (xxx).

• Explain:  "He is not offering a new gospel in any religious sense, but, in this text, he provides a social gospel based on history, sociology, and personal experience" (xxxiv).

• What, according to Du Bois, is the "end" of the Black man's "striving"?

• According to Du Bois, was the slave accurate in believing that "Emancipation was the key to a promised land" (12)?

• What three specific things does Du Bois say the Black people need?

• Explain:  "We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness" (16).

• What was the basis for the Civil War?

• In what ways was the Freedmen's Bureau "a full-fledged government of men" (26)?

• Explain the figure of the "gray-haired gentleman" and the "dark and mother-like" form.

• What two obstacles impeded the success of the Freedmen's Bureau?

• Does Du Bois believe that "an educated Negro is a dangerous Negro" (29)?  Explain.

• What was the difference between Bureau courts and regular civil courts?

• Explain what Du Bois describes as the "large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau" (33).

• What, according to Du Bois, was significant about the time during which Booker T. Washington came to gain prominence?

• To whom (i.e. which inhabitants) does "The South" refer?
• Explain:  "It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force" (35).

• What, according to Du Bois, is more important, self-respect or wealth?
• What three things, according to Du Bois, has Washington asked Blacks to give up on?

• What three dangerous "half-truths" does Du Bois see in Washington's "propaganda"?

• What duty do "the black men of America" have to perform?

• What is the significance of Du Bois's letter to Washington in response to this address?

• Explain:  "It is in the South that the Negro is given a man's chance in the commercial world" (168).
• Explain:  "We shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour" (168).
• Explain:  "It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top" (168).

• Explain the hand/finger analogy.

• Do you agree with the editors that in this obituary Du Bois is "generous to his old rival" (171)?  Explain.

• Explain:  "All this caused us to think some thoughts together: but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages" (50).

• What "Progress" has been made since Du Bois's time in Alexandria?

• What, according to Du Bois, is the true function of the university?

• Explain:  "And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black" (65).

• What is the "Talented Tenth"?

• What, according to Du Bois, is the proper function of the "Negro college"?

• What is the mood of this piece?  Explain.
• What is the relationship between Du Bois as narrator and the people he describes?

• What are the three steps in the development of the slave song?  What possible fourth step does Du Bois include?

What three contributions by Blacks to America does Du Bois list?

• Why does Du Bois describe his students in such detail?

• Why does Du Bois go around to find out why certain students miss class?  What is significant about their reasons?
• Why would Du Bois get embarrassed at bedtime?  Why would people "retire" when he went to bed?

• What is a nameless child?
• How does Josie die?

• Explain:  "How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!" (53-54).  What is Du Bois's final point here?

• Explain Du Bois's question at the end.  Does he imply an answer?  Explain.

• What is the "iron baptism of war" (54)?

• Explain:  "It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream" (55).
• Explain:  "Is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay" (55).

• What characterizes the "finer type of Southerner" (56)?

• Explain:  "The part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood" (57).
• Which two figures "embodied once the ideal of the people" (57)?  How so?

• Explain:  "Teach the workers to work, the thinkers to think" (61).

• In what way can the development of educational institutions for Blacks after the Civil War, be considered "a flat reversal of nature" (66).

• How were Blacks in the late 18th Century South "a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself" (67)?

• What evidence does Du Bois provide to support his claim that the education of the Black has not been a waste?

• Explain:  "Color and race are not crimes, and yet they it is which in this land receives most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West" (72).

• What is the "Black Belt"?

• What is the "Cotton Kingdom"?

• Explain:  "Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury" (80).

• Explain:  "There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro" (85).

• What, if any, final moral does Du Bois present at the end of this piece?

• What is the significance of the verse quotation that opens this piece?

• Explain:  "Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil" (155).
• Explain:  "The human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty" (155).
• Explain:  "The world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that it can never wholly forget them again" (155-56).

• Explain:  "These songs are the articulate message of the slaves to the world" (156).

• Explain:  "Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulated" (159).
• What characterizes the ten "master songs" that Du Bois lists?

• What is significant about the subject matter Du Bois describes in the first paragraph of this page?

• Explain:  "The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave" (161).

• Explain:  "Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope--a faith in the ultimate justice of things" (162).
• Does Du Bois believe such a hope is justified?
• Explain:  "Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation" (162).

• To whom is this addressed?  Explain the first seven words.