Souls of Black Folk

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South
Civil Rights

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South

07/28/2023 Bruce Strom 0

There was one very real benefit of slavery to the enslaved in the Deep South. Before the Civil War, slaves were far less likely to be lynched or killed than were freed slaves after the war. The reason for this was simple: it is illegal to damage someone’s property, and slaves were extremely valuable. Slaves were the most valuable asset class in America before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, a slave was worth as much as an economy car is worth today. […]

Summary Three Generations Black Leaders
Civil Rights

Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders: Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois

12/16/2022 Bruce Strom 4

Who do we consider to be the leaders of the first three generations of black leaders? Frederick Douglass, first generation black leader, abolitionist writer and orator, who was born a slave and escaped to freedom; Booker T Washington, educator, second generation black leader, who was born a slave, was freed when the Civil War ended; and WEB Du Bois, third generation black leader, civil rights activist, author and scholar, who was born free in Massachusetts after the Civil War, chose to attend college in the Deep South, and was co-founder of the NAACP. […]

Civil Rights

Tensions Between WEB Du Bois and Booker T Washington, Accommodation or Activism?

10/19/2022 Bruce Strom 2

As WEB Du Bois, our contrarian activist leader, rose in prominence in the black civil rights movement, he came into conflict with the accommodationist Booker T Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute. While Booker T Washington always encouraged blacks be subservient and work hard and save their pennies so that someday their lives will improve, WEB Du Bois demanded dignity, civil rights, and real economic opportunity for blacks. […]

Civil Rights

Autobiography of WEB Du Bois: His Youth and School Years

10/14/2022 Bruce Strom 3

To understand WEB Du Bois, you must first know that he was truly an intellectual, you could almost say that he was incapable of pouring out his feelings; rather, he can instead deliver a thirty-minute soliloquy of his feelings, displaying little emotion. Indeed, this is how WEB Dubois describes his autobiography: “This book is the Soliloquy of an old man on what he dreams his life has been as he sees it slowly drifting away; and what he would like others to believe.” […]

Civil Rights

WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping

08/10/2022 Bruce Strom 0

How does WEB Dubois start his essay on the life of Alexander Crummell? By how he confronted the temptations and doubts that faced all talented black men in a time when whites could not comprehend that a black man could actually be a true intellectual, that he could think independently of his white overlords. WEB starts his essay, “This is the history of a human heart, the tale of a black boy who” “struggled with life that he might know the world and know himself,” fulfilling the instructions written on the Temple of Delphi so many millennia ago. […]