Next

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Importance of Higher Education

Throughout his essays, Du Bois emphasizes that education is the only way for Black Americans to achieve their goal for a better future. He also notes that the goal of higher education should not merely be to increase the chance of material success through hard labor, but that higher education should provide young people with a better understanding of life and reveal opportunities for more rewarding and intellectual careers. Near the end of the first chapter, he explains the need for white America to stop viewing Black culture as a threat and to stop excluding Black people from public institutions and places of higher learning. 

Du Bois emphasizes the importance of a classic college education as opposed to industrial or technical schooling. He argues that although some Black people may prefer to work as laborers, others can succeed in more intellectual settings and become leaders. The author is clear that Black people understand their own need to be educated in order to obtain a brighter future, and to illustrate this point he includes a description of his happy days as a teacher in a small rural town where he was able to pass on his knowledge and to develop as a scholar himself.

Du Bois also points out how the pursuit of knowledge can be a mixed blessing for some Black people. On the one hand, they have an opportunity to advance themselves and their community. On the other, this same experience can lead to feelings of disconnect from those who did not have the opportunity to pursue a better education. Despite this duality, education is still the main concept at the center of Du Bois’s theory of racial uplift, and he believes education plays an integral role in how society in general can be shaped for the better.

The Suffering of Black Americans

From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Du Bois paints pictures of the suffering that Black Americans endured and continue to endure. He argues that even the few Black people who manage to achieve prosperity, obtain higher education, and enjoy professional success cannot escape the psychological and emotional effects of living in a racist society. Du Bois himself is a key example of this phenomenon. He is born into an affluent family of freed people, attends top universities, and maintains a respected academic career, but nonetheless he is plagued by the feeling that others consider him inferior.

The constant presence of the Veil limits Black people who lack financial security and familial stability due to the lingering burdens of slavery. Du Bois reveals how the legacy of slavery as well as contemporary legal and economic discrimination combine to create a situation in which Black people have severely limited access to the wealth, safety, and opportunities that they deserve and that their white peers enjoy. He speaks repeatedly of the metaphorical color-line, which no Black person can cross and come back alive.

Emancipation Does Not Equal Freedom

The much-anticipated Emancipation Proclamation, meant to officially abolish slavery across the United States, did not bring the freedom that it promised to Black people. Du Bois explains that Emancipation was supposed to be the key to a promised land, but in its aftermath, it becomes clear that not all freed people are able to take full advantage of their freedom. In the years following Emancipation, many Black people in the South still labor for white landowners who exploit them. They remain extremely poor, and the environment in which they live, the lives they lead, and their prospects for the future are not much better than during slavery. Although those who create the Freedmen’s Bureau and deliver promises of Reconstruction do so with the intention of providing a better future for freed slaves, these promises remain unfulfilled and leave many Black people trapped in a cycle of extreme poverty.

Du Bois also talks about the rise of white supremacist groups that balk at the notion of equal opportunities for Black people. In public, white landowners refuse to cede any portion of their property to freed slaves, and in private they terrorize Black people to make them fearful of claiming what they are entitled to by law. The psychological effects of racism are evident across the Black experience and influence Du Bois’s examination of what freedom really means. He determines that Emancipation did not equal freedom. Whereas in the past Black people were imprisoned by slavery, after Emancipation they remain imprisoned by segregation, poverty, and the psychological weight of the Veil.

Next section Motifs

Take a Study Break