The Souls of Black Folk

Character Guide

Spoiler-free — fuller detail (with spoilers, if you want them) lives in the reader's Guide tab.

W.E.B. Du Bois (the narrator)

The author himself, a Black scholar and sociologist who serves as narrator and guide, exploring what it means to live 'behind the Veil' of race in America.

Booker T. Washington

The most prominent Black leader of the era, introduced as an advocate of industrial education, economic self-help, and political conciliation toward the white South.

Alexander Crummell

An elderly Black clergyman and scholar whose life story is held up as an example of a gifted man struggling against isolation, doubt, and racial prejudice.

Josie

A bright, eager young girl from a poor rural Tennessee family whom Du Bois meets while teaching school; she hungers for education and a better life.

George L. White

A white Freedmen's Bureau teacher in Nashville who formed a singing class of Black children and went on to found a traveling choir to share their music with the world.

The Grimkés, Kelly Miller, and J. W. E. Bowen (the 'other group' of Negro leaders)

A cohort of educated Black thinkers introduced as holding views distinct from Washington's, insisting on voting rights, civic equality, and higher education.

Glossary

The Veil

Du Bois's central metaphor for the invisible barrier of race separating Black Americans from full participation in and recognition by white America.

Double-consciousness

Du Bois's term for the psychological experience of Black Americans seeing themselves both through their own eyes and through the contemptuous gaze of white society.

The color-line

Du Bois's famous phrase for the racial divide he identifies as 'the problem of the twentieth century.'

Sorrow Songs

Du Bois's name for the African American spirituals/slave songs, which he treats as the great original American art form and as coded expressions of suffering and hope.

Atlanta Compromise

The nickname for Booker T. Washington's 1895 speech accepting social segregation in exchange for white support of Black economic advancement.

Freedmen's Bureau

The U.S. government agency (1865–1872) created to assist formerly enslaved people with education, labor contracts, and legal protection after the Civil War.

Black Belt

The historic region of the Deep South with fertile soil and a dense enslaved and later Black population, discussed as the heart of the South's racial and economic order.

Shouting (the Frenzy)

An ecstatic form of worship in Black religious services—rhythmic movement, cries, and trance-like states believed to signal the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Jubilee Singers

The touring choir from Fisk University that popularized the slave spirituals internationally, raising money to sustain the school.

Obi / conjure

African-derived folk-magic and spirit practices (witchcraft, spells, exorcism) that Du Bois describes as surviving among enslaved people alongside Christianity.

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