1896 to study the effect of urban problems on African Americans. He also edited the annual volumes that issued from the conferences and taught a course on sociology. Yet by 1910 he moved away from pure sociology and toward other forms of address and redress, such as fiction, and his activism in the NAACP.7
Du Bois’s early commitment to empiricism is uncontested, but the question of whether and if so, when his commitment wavered varies as critics consider the significance of his varied rhetorical strategies and methods in doing anti-racist work. Wilson Moses argues, for example, that Du Bois the scholar initially adopted the discourse of the social sciences because “as a youth Du Bois was romantically involved with the idea of social science, which he naively believed might yield a science of racial advancement.”8 To describe this commitment as romantic suggests that Du Bois’s faith in empiricism as a weapon against social injustice was youthfully naïve, an interpretation that resonates with other critics who note that as Du Bois matured and became more aware of the roots of racial inequality, his approach to sociological research changed. Green and Driver note, “beginning in 1901 and continuing until his public split with [Booker T.] Washington in 1903, he was apparently moving through a transition period away from academic science and sociology toward action, agitation, and writing for popular magazines” (19). The lynching of Sam Hose, a Palmetto, Georgia farmer proved especially influential to Du Bois’s diminished belief in the value of inductive reasoning as a tool for social engineering.9 He became convinced, they assert, that scientific investigation was not sufficient to solve the problems of Black Americans because the problems were not, as he had initially and idealistically assumed, those of ignorance, but were instead based on the conscious determination of one group to suppress and persecute another.
In contrast, Robert Stepto argues that Du Bois adhered to a scientific language because of his desire for authentication. “He seeks nothing less than a new narrative mode and form in which empirical evidence, scientifically gathered in a literal and figurative field (for example, the Black Belt), performs the authenticating chores previously completed by white opinion.”10 And Houston Baker underscores Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to scientific observation, stating that “while studying in Berlin under Gustav Schmoller (1892–94), Du Bois came to believe that the solution to the American racial problem was a matter of systematic investigation,’ and throughout his life he was dedicated to critical objectivity—to what Mathew Arnold defined as ‘disinterestedness.’”11
Du Bois’s view of empiricism and inductive reasoning (which he never fully abandoned) is as important as his level of commitment to these methods. Even as a young scholar, his work shows that he reflected on the possibilities and limits of constructing a scientific discourse on race, even as he revealed an acute awareness of the cultural capital that science held. In 1903, when he published The Souls of Black Folk, the reader finds Du Bois wary of an unquestioning embrace of empiricism and even of the possibility of a Negro living a “life of the mind.” Rather than advocating pure science early in his career, which he later retains or discards depending on the critic’s point of view, we can see Du Bois inhabiting the middle ground, at the intersections of thought and action, reason and emotion, scholarship and activism.
Shamoon Zamir’s argument that the empirical and emotional exist dialectically in Du Bois’s body of work introduces an alternative to other critics’ chronological or developmental narratives of Du Bois’s thought on the uses of sociology. Reflecting on the importance of his writing the first chapters of Souls while in the midst of working on The Philadelphia Negro, Zamir identifies a “triumphant” conflict between scientific empiricism and political advocacy, or between “thought and feeling.” He concludes, “if the different approaches represent conflicting understandings, then it is the very contradictions and struggles, not the straightforward triumph of one option over another, that must be accepted as the truth of Du Bois’s thought” (55–56). Dialectical exchange can be seen as the operable mode not only among discrete periods of his career, or texts (Souls and Philadelphia), but also within the singular masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk.12 Thought and feeling, or science and activism, acquire meaning when we understand one in relation to the other. Du Bois makes evident his awareness of this fact in his layering and piecing together of different discursive traditions.
Race, Marginality, and the Formation of National Communities
The Souls of Black Folk is comprised of twelve essays and one short story, addressing a range of topics from the personal, to the sociological, historical, ethnographic, and political.13 According to Gates and West, the breadth of topics and genres mirrors the scope of Du Bois’s accomplishments. They call the book a monumental achievement that charts “the contours of the civilization [the Negro “nation-within-a-nation”]—the arts and sciences, the metaphysical and religious systems, the myths and music, the social and political institutions, the history both before and after Emancipation—that defined a truly African American culture at the outset of the new century.”14 The work’s expansiveness was necessary for Du Bois to successfully portray Negro “civilization” from both internal and external points of view. Sociology gave him a framework through which he could produce an empirical and historical analysis of the state of Black America. Fiction allowed him to explore the post-emancipation dynamics between the emerging intellectual and professional classes and the masses of Black Southerners; and the “sorrow songs,” as Du Bois called African American spirituals, voice the despair, longings, and hopes of Black people who had been historically silenced and subordinated because of the dual stigmas of color and poverty. In all these discursive moments, Du Bois presents himself as a representative subject who exhibits kinship and solidarity with the oppressed from a shared history of oppression, even as the adoption of the social scientist’s identity in the service of racial uplift and activism produces a tension that threatens to unravel the affiliations he so fiercely maintains.
The Souls of Black Folk is not the first work in which Du Bois experiments with the rhetorical approach of simultaneously representing the Negro from “without” and “within,” although he did not necessarily accomplish this through discursive hybridity, as he does in Souls. In “The Black North in 1901,” he tackles the perception that Black communities in the North are homogenous by twinning his analysis of demographic statistics about social patterns such as domestic configurations and employment statistics with a brief psychological sketch of the “average New York negro” that attempts to describe the emotional and psychic resources on which Black people draw in response to racism. In the essay he observes, “they live and move in a community of their own kith and kin and shrink quickly and permanently from those rough edges where contact with the larger life of the city wounds and humiliates them” (reprinted in Green and Driver 151).15 This description emphasizes that social contact across interracial lines is obstructed by a racism that can be palpable in its damaging effects. Du Bois states that racism is a force from which the Negro shrinks and retreats into the protective fold of a homogenous community in an act of self-defense. Yet this observation occurs in as essay in which substantial effort has been made to establish the high degree of social, economic, and moral differences among Blacks in New York’s segregated neighborhoods. The incongruous representation of New York Blacks as both heterogeneous and insular suggests that both juxtaposition to and segregation from a dominant group can render a marginalized community cut off and isolated. Rather than positioning Blacks, the domestic U.S. version of the primitive others, as “out of time,” Du Bois underscores the notion that segregation is directly caused by adverse social and historical forces.
Insights such as these were made possible by Du Bois’s multiple allegiances to scholarly and racial communities. Inspired by the liminality of his own subject position, he introduces the symbol of the veil as a figure for the racial divide. The image can also be read as a symbol of the ethnographer as participant-observer. In the “Forethought” of The Souls of Black Folk, he conjures an image of a narrator unique in his ability to move and communicate across the color line: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,
