In today’s world, many people may question why HBCUs are still necessary; blacks today can go to any school they want this day and age. While this is true, I feel that there is a certain level of formation offered at HBCUs that schools like Boston College simply can not provide. Most HBCUs were founded…
Category: W.E.B. DuBois
The Truth Leads to Beauty
In W.E.B Du bois’ “Criteria of Negro Art”, Truth is a term that is repeated by Du bois to emphasize how it is an important aspect of Beauty that Black artists need to demonstrate in their works. Dubois sates that for a Black artist to demonstrate beauty, there must be Truth, and, “… not for…
An Uphill Battle
In Hugh’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, he uses the image of a mountain to represent the obstacle “in the way of true Negro art;” it is the “race towards whiteness” and “the desire to pour race individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Du Bois also uses the image of a mountain…
DuBois and the Disparate Visions of American Propaganda
DuBois questions his audience at the NAACP at the beginning of his speech, “Criteria of Negro Art,”. He asks, if you “suddenly should become full-fledged Americans,” meaning fully assimilated into the dominant white culture, what would you do? (5). While DuBois creates imagery of white obsession with “flamboyant” luxuries like powerful “motor cars,” and “elaborate…
The Beauty of Truth and Right: Du Bois on Black Art and Justice
In “Criteria of Negro Art”, W. E. B. Du Bois acclaims the development of black art alongside the continuing fight for racial equality in the United States, condemning both those who cannot understand its development, considering their understanding that a people cannot at the same time be fighting and creating art, and those who are…
Obsession with Black Bodies and the White Gaze in Souls of Black Folk (Chapter 13)
Chapter 13 of W.E.B. DuBois tells the fictional story of two men named John, both born in Altamaha, both college-educated, one white, the other black. In the story, the black John returns from the institute carrying the sorrowful burden of the Veil, while the white John Henderson returns with a disdain for his small “town…
The father, the son, and the Veil that had yet to fall.
In Chapter XI of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois recalls the birth and death of his son. Throughout the chapter, the Veil is something Du Bois struggles with: peace in knowing his son never truly fell within its shadow, or grief that his son might have lived in a world in which the Veil…
Questioning the skin you’re in
In The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois, in the first chapter he poses a question that initiates his own reflection of his identity. By his identity, I mean him being an African American and a man in America. The first question Du Bois poses is “How does it feel to be a…
The Backward Aspects of Education
In “Chapter VI. Of the Training of Black Men”, of W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, he discusses what the education system was like and how the freed black people were trained in professions in the years after the Emancipation. Du Bois demonstrates how slavery’s legacy affected the roles of black and white…
The City of Atlanta: Personified in Time
(A continuation of my post called “The City of Atlanta: Both ‘North’ and ‘South’”) In terms of time, DuBois anchors Atlanta in history as “peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.” “Peering” personifies the city in a way that sets up DuBois’ comparison with the figure Atalanta later…
Black Matter 