February 24

Discussed in class on February 24 was the double consciousness.  American author W.E.B. Du Bois highlighted on this concept of two-ness, an idea were the individual is always looking at his or herself through the eyes of others.  This was a particularly poignant message for the African American crowd in the early years of the twentieth century as their idea of how they were suppose to look, act, and behave was often challenged by just about everyone.  For example there was the struggle of the segregation.  "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.  Many whites were unable to cope with the sight of a black person let alone communicate with them.  Seen as an inferior race due to their background of slavery and enforced subordination blacks were never taken seriously by many of the white population.  It didn't help that men like Marcus Garvey were walking around the streets of major cities touting their ideas that the whole African American population was going to have a mass exodus of people moving back to Africa and that the problem of the race problem would be solved when born and raised American citizens were going to move back to Africa.
There was also the problem of class within the African American community.  Educated individuals such as W.E.B Du Bois himself, who was considered a very well-versed, educated, and well-groomed individual, often struggled uniting the African American population as a whole.  Du Bois views the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, or in other words this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.  The problem of two-ness was very evident in this situation.  There was a small population of black educated writers and other artists living in major northern cities.  Often they prided themselves on their good manners and education as they sought to improve the African American social standing.  When uneducated southern blacks moved from the south to the north seeking a better life and better pay they often overcrowded the cities and clashed with other blacks already well established in those neighborhoods.