A Prophecy Repeated
The phrase is stated three times in the book — in the Forethought, in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," and at the climax of "Of the Dawn of Freedom." Each repetition extends its scope. What might first sound like an American particular becomes a planetary diagnosis: the relations of darker to lighter peoples in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
A Concrete Test of the Republic
Du Bois insists that the colour-line is not a regional pathology or a leftover of slavery to be waited out, but the concrete test of the republic's founding principles. The "spiritual striving" of the freedmen's sons is the travail of a people who carry the burden in the name of human opportunity itself — for if the republic cannot recognise them, it cannot claim to be the republic it professes to be.
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
A Century to Come
Written in 1903, before two world wars, before decolonisation, before the long civil rights struggle, the diagnosis proved chillingly accurate. Du Bois lived to see much of the century unfold — and to argue, at the end of his life, that the colour-line had merely been redrawn rather than dissolved. The phrase outlives its century because the structure it names did.
The Forethought (1903) opens with this sentence. Du Bois had already used a version of the formulation in his 1900 address to the London Pan-African Conference.
Related Concepts
