The Awakening of W.E.B. Du Bois

Abstract

keywords: primacy of black feeling, verstehen Sociology, double consciousness, race

abstract:  This is an interpretive article that concentrates on the early W.E.B. Du Bois who shaped the wider world's understanding of the Black experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Under the intellectual compression of learning and scholarship at the highest level, an awakening Du Bois developed ideas evolved in his youth and early maturity about the primacy of African American "feeling" and its importance in rejuvenating the American personality as well as the regeneration of Africa.  Influenced by William James's pragmatism and interest in the paranormal as well as the verstehen method of Sociology learned in Germany, Du Bois sought a humanistic perspective by extending the frontiers of art, culture and spiritual values to fulfill a vision of the Africana great-souled person.  As prelude to The Souls of Black People, Du Bois undertook his scholarship from the inside-out.  Instead of positing the so-called "Negro Problem" as a problem to be solved in the style of academic Philosophy or statistical Sociology, Du Bois took the point of view of one who lived the strain and stresses afflicting African Americans, sharing their hopes and failures in the search for recognition and respect thereby introducing an alternative to traditional definitions of thought and reality.