A Timeless Legacy
Celebrating 100 years of W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk
BY KENDRA HAMILTON

Here's a little known fact worth savoring on the centennial of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk: Its author, the restlessly brilliant and relentlessly controversial Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was at Tuskegee University when the book published, says Dr. Manning Marable, professor of public affairs, political science and history and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.

Those who haven't read The Souls in a while may not immediately appreciate the richness of the irony. But Du Bois' slender book of essays and fiction also contained a withering — and nearly unprecedented — critique of Tuskegee University founder Booker T. Washington's strategy of racial accommodation, a critique that had to have resounded on campus like a thunderclap. In short, Du Bois had made himself "a pariah," Marable says.

For many years after his death, Du Bois seemed exiled to the wilderness, his place in the African American imagination by agitation over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, women's rights, Black Power and much more, convulsed the nation in the '60s and '70s, seemed distinctly marginal. But it's clear today, 40 years after the "old man's" death, 100 years since The Souls of Black Folk forked like lightning across the nation's dark racial skies, that W.E.B. Du Bois and his seminal volume of essays represent a timeless legacy.

Encountering ‘The Doctor'

Du Bois is the touchstone for African American scholars seeking a Ph.D. or struggling to establish themselves in their various fields. This is true almost regardless of generation, but for senior scholars there is what can only be described as a very special relationship.

Everyone has a story about the first time they encountered "the Doctor."