Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/150

 REVIEWS.

The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. By W. E. B. DuBois, Professor of Economics and History in Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. Pp. viii + 265. $1.20, net.

IN this volume of essays and sketches Professor DuBois approaches the many-sided negro question with the confidence and conviction of a master, and with the grace and beauty of a poet. The crux of the problem, as he views it, is the adequate training of the black man in the higher industrial and intellectual education. To him the all- important product of this education "must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man;" and in this particular the efforts of the southern universities for the training of negroes are of great and far-reaching importance.

The author is at his best in an unbiased consideration of the negro's emotional nature. In the chapter " Of Our Spiritual Striv- ings" he outlines the struggles in which this emotionalism involves the black man. That there can be no doubt of the preponderance of misdirected emotionalism is evidenced in the rapidity with which the negro swings from love to hate, from laughter to tears.

But Professor DuBois most clearly comprehends that peculiar phase of interracial strivings which brings about the control of a man by the possession of those agents and forces which furnish him the means of subsistence. It appears that, through ignorance of conditions and lack of business foresight, the negro farmer is a ready victim for the white trader and cotton buyer. Being generally restricted by his land- lord to the raising of cotton, he makes the crop either on shares or under a crop or chattel mortgage for provisions advanced during the period of cultivation. The chances of freedom from debt are thus the slightest, being dependent upon the success of a crop planted in an already over-worked soil and upon the price offered by the buyer. The relation which the white "furnisher" sustains to the black farmer thus becomes practically that of slaver and enslaved. The struggles and the unhopefulness of the negro under this industrial bondage are thoughtfully discussed in the two chapters which deal with the " Black Belt."

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