W.E.B. Dubois
The first individual in this series is W.E.B. Dubois. Throughout Souls of Black Folk Dubois returns again and again to the concept of a veil that separates and hides the lives of one community from another. This covering shields a community's true self from the rest of the world, and in so doing internally divides and fragments that community. In particular the veil makes invisible the joys and the sorrows that make us human. From one side of the veil it seems inconceivable that there is anything analogous on the other, when the two in fact are woven of the same cloth.
While I read Souls of Black Folk in college, I find Dubois' voice speaks differently to me now. In one of the chapters of the book Dubois talks about his only son, Burghardt. Although this investigation is primarily about Dubois - the educator, the poet, the intellectual, the scholar, the sociologist - this time around the point at which I feel most connected to him is as a father.
