Nada Ibrahim on Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk
This essay was written by Nada, a New York City high school senior, as part of the Freedom and Citizenship summer seminar in 2023. To read more student writing, visit the students' Civic Digest.
“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins: the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” -Du Bois, p. 4
Emancipation, as W.E.B. Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk, appeared to be an illusion of freedom for African Americans. Du Bois expresses this by stating that “the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (Du Bois 4). While it is relatively easy to change laws on paper, changing people’s deeply ingrained mindsets is much harder. People were not willing to let go of the perception that Black people were inferior to them. This ideology has been passed down in generations because the environment and teachings children grow up in perpetuates a cycle of racism.
Du Bois references carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan to support his rationale that freedom was just an illusion. Carpetbaggers were Northerners in the South seeking to exploit and profit from the Reconstruction. These people viewed emancipation as a business opportunity for themselves instead of focusing on helping African Americans assimilate into society after their enslavement. The Ku Klux Klan was more direct in hindering the succession of African Americans, white Southerners used terrorism to repress Black people and reaffirm their supremacist views. The KKK could and did get away with murder, which was used as a fearmongering tool.
The fact that the KKK and other such groups are still around today is evidence that African Americans never really attained true freedom. No law will ever give people of color freedom; it must first occur in people's thinking, where everyone is recognized as a human without prejudice towards any particular race.
