The Soul Of Black Folk Summary

In The Soul of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, we see that the novel itself is a collection of his own articles and writing that he cleverly uses to express his view of African Americans immediately after the emancipation and everything that was still wrong with it. This collection of writing showed the racial inequalities, oppression and the everyday day struggle that African Americans were faced with every day. Not only pointing out the problems, Du Bois fights for fixing these problems and brings up an important metaphor that is crucial to how African Americans get by in society. He provides an insight into the struggles unlike any others. Du Bois begins his novel by showing what the burden of being an African American was at the time. He reflects to a time in elementary school where
Du Bois states that this is first time that he realized that African Americans were thought of as less of, below and a lower class than white Americans simply because of their skin color. He shows from this experience that while cultures differed, education was directly affected by this for African Americans. Because African Americans and their culture was thought to be below white American’s the education of African Americans directly suffered. This downward look upon them placed by society was very demeaning to those who identified as African American. Psychologically when you are looked down upon, told you are less, eventually you will begin to believe until you tell yourself these things. While society was cruel, African Americans were psychologically forced to believe these things. The main metaphor that Du Bois attempted to present in The Soul of Black Folk was the “veil” that surrounded them in society. This “veil” was worn by African Americans alone because their political, economic and social views differed from the white American. Du Bois refers to the veil as the