The Souls of Black Folk was published by A.C. McClurg in Chicago in 1903. It is one of the foundational texts of American intellectual life — a work that simultaneously inaugurated African-American sociology, challenged Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist politics, introduced concepts (double consciousness, the Veil, the Talented Tenth) that remain central to racial discourse, and achieved a literary quality that places it alongside the finest American prose of any era.
The book’s famous opening — “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” — announced with prophetic precision the century’s central conflict. The fourteen essays that follow address education, politics, economics, spirituality, and culture, but their unifying thread is Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness”: the peculiar sensation of always looking at oneself “through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The Black American, Du Bois argues, exists behind a “Veil” — visible to the white world only as a problem, never as a full consciousness.
Chapter III, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” directly challenged the most powerful Black leader in America: Washington advocated industrial education and accommodation to segregation; Du Bois demanded full political rights, higher education, and immediate equality. The dispute — between Washington’s pragmatism and Du Bois’s uncompromising demand for justice — defined African-American politics for a generation.
The book’s final chapter, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” examines the spirituals as America’s only original art form — the creation of enslaved people who transformed suffering into beauty. Du Bois places the spirituals alongside Beethoven and Wagner as artistic achievements of the highest order — a claim that was revolutionary in 1903 and has been vindicated by subsequent cultural history.
Collecting The Souls of Black Folk
First edition (A.C. McClurg, Chicago, 1903): Cloth binding (brown or dark green boards with gilt titles). No dust jacket issued (or extremely rare if so).
Market values:
- First edition (1903, fine condition): $3,000–$10,000
- Good condition with wear: $1,000–$3,000
- Second edition (1903, same year): $500–$1,000
- Signed copies (extremely rare): $10,000–$30,000+
One of the most important American books of the twentieth century. First editions are genuinely rare in fine condition — the dark cloth shows wear easily, and most surviving copies have been heavily read. Institutional demand competes with private collectors for fine examples.