Essay on WEB Du Bois: Racial Co-existence

Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. UMDrive. The University of Memphis. N.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.

It was the constant trade to get slaves which made the colonists depend on slave labor. Slave labor was so profitable, most slave owners treated their slaves as property. Beatings, starvation, and overworking were common practices on the plantations. The slave owners didn’t care because they were making money from the

Slavery and indentured servitude were the primary means of help for the wealthy in America. Either as a slave or as an indentured servant a person was required to work in the fields maintain crops, as a house servant or as the owner of debtor so chooses. The treatment of both was very similar, but the method and means to which they came to America were uniquely different as the following examples will illustrate.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B DuBois pioneers two concepts that describe the Black experience in America— the notions of “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” The meaning and implication of these words not only describe the plight of being Black and American then, it also refers to what it means to still be Black and American today – the remnants of the past live on. DuBois explains the veil concept in reference to three things: the literal darker skin of Blacks, which is the physical demarcation of the difference from whiteness, white people’s lack of clarity in order to see Blacks as “true” Americans, and lastly Blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what white America prescribes for them. The idea of double consciousness refers to the two-ness, caused by our nations flawed and polarized system, felt by many Blacks. I argue that although DuBois was the first to coin these two terms, it is clear through analyzing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 12 Years a Slave that these two significant concepts gave a name to what African-Americans had been feeling for years but previously could not define.

Slavery was a system of forced labor popular in the 17th and 18th century that exploited and oppressed blacks. Slavery was an issue in the US that brought on many complex responses. Slave labor introduced to the United States a multitude of issues that questioned political, economical, and social morals. As slave labor increased due to the booming of cottage industries with the market revolution, reactions to these issues differed between regions, creating a sectional split of the United States between industrial North and plantation South. Historiographers Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese, in their respective articles, attempt to interpret the attitudes of American slaves toward their experiences of work as well as the social and economic implications of slave labor.

Thus, slavery pulled white workers down in two ways: one, by direct competition with slave labor in the South, and two, by associating all the industrious efforts of workers with those of the degraded slaves.”

Two societies, two regions, the north and the south had very different views on slavery and struggled to be on the same terms. Slavery was basically claiming human beings as property. Slavery was very crucial and accepted in the southern states. In the south, slavery was considered a necessity in order to maintain the agricultural economy of the entire region. The fertile soil and climate of the southern region made it ideal for large scale farms (plantations) and crops like tobacco and cotton. Slavery was a southerner’s way of life as economic growth stimulated from the ever-expanding system of staple crop production, notably cotton that depended on the labor of at most 4 million slaves. Slaveholders worked these African American slave’s days in and out on plantation farms growing crops mostly cotton that was also sold to the north! The southerners protested that slavery could not be eliminated without

Few men have influenced the lives of African-Americans as much as William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois is considered more of a history-maker than a historian(Aptheker, "The Historian"). Dr. Du Bois conducted the initial research on the black experience in the United States. Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. have referred to Du Bois as a father of the Civil Rights Movement. Du Bois conducted the initial research on the black experience in the United States, and paved the way for the Pan-African and Black Power movements. This paper will describe his life, work, influence in the black community, and much publicized civil dispute with another black leader, Booker T. Washington.

The book, The Spirituals and the Blues, by James H. Cone, illustrates how the slave spirituals and the blues reflected the struggle for black survival under the harsh reality of slavery and segregation. The spirituals are historical songs which speak out about the rupture of black lives in a religious sense, telling us about people in a land of bondage, and what they did to stay united and somehow fight back. The blues are somewhat different from in the spirituals in that they depict the secular aspect of black life during times of oppression and the capacity to survive. James H. Cone’s portrayal of how the spirituals and the blues aided blacks through times of hardship and adversity

Slavery lives on all era in world history till lately, but its life has not constantly had the similar economic trait. Two questions ought to be answered to properly examine any definite cause of slavery: (1) what further systems of labor live in the civilization also to slavery? And (2) what system of labor is leading? In this manner we can make a difference among ancient slavery (e.g., in Greece and Egypt where free farmers live together with slaves, but slavery was leading) and antebellum slavery in the United States (which live together with free farmers, but was conquered by the industrially-based capitalism of the urban North). The past dominance of capitalism in the United States made antebellum slavery the most uncivilized system of slave work. Not

The Songs sited in each chapter of this book was put together to deliberately guide the reader’s cerebration process in scrutinizing the context to identify with DuBois of how these events described effected Black people during this era in our history. Each example was directly associated with the subsequent chapter and solidified the arguments from DuBois’ perspective. It was translucently clear that the deliberate specimens of the song segments and the essays themselves; that from DuBois’ perspective, the Black population in the South had not been given the appropriate opportunities, adequate education and resources to be prosperous, but rather given a liberation that was inferior to their slavery.

The abolitionist movement would never link to the textile industry if the subject of slave labor were not the cotton grown in the southern part of the United States. Later on, slaves from the south found new owners in the middle states that embraced cotton growing (Ferrell, 2006). The development of commerce created a dependence of slave labor because cotton was the raw material for textile mills that supported the industrial cities that were around Boston. Beyond the direct labor of slaves in picking and putting cotton in bales for shipment, other laborers also faced slavelike conditions in the industrial mills where they toiled under grueling conditions (Porterfield, 2006). The quest to free factory workers and the desire of the workers to have a better say for their involvement in the industry became an obvious attraction to the quest of the abolitionists.

The argument was presented very well. The argument of the slave-owners compared the treatment of southern slaves with laborers of the south, known as “wage slaves”. However, whether the argument is true or not is another thing. The slave-owners claimed to treat the slaves equally and care for them, but did they really do that, or were they somewhat “harsh”

W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Souls of Black Folk is an African American heritage text that explores the history of race relations, black education, post-Civil War issues, and the ongoing war between white Americans and black Americans. The Souls of Black Folk, is a collection of thirteen different essays and short stories written between 1897 and 1903 by Du Bois. All of the essays link together by providing common themes; the existence of the veil or the separated black and white populations, the importance of education, and “double consciousness”. The theme of "The Veil" is one of the central pieces Du Bois touches on.

Labour to the East Indians meant as a commodity whereas to the Slaves, their labour was once their own self. The East Indians sold their labour, subsequently being a product, to make a living and attempt to survive economically, this used to be their efforts financially and to start a business. However, on the aspect of the slaves, labour was himself, which means that the slave himself was sold.