W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk is the most celebrated book about the black life in the United States, as well as it is a foundational text of the field now identified as African-American Studies. It is increasingly becoming a classic for religious studies as well. With the term “soul” Dubois invites readers within “the veil,” into the inner-worlds of black communities at the turn of the twentieth century. Writing against the grain just after the triumph of legal segregation, he affirmed black humanity by asserting black interiority. A small signal of Dubois’ significance, “soul” has since become synonymous with blackness. However, he developed a grammar of “spirit” to interpret religion in the United States, and black contributions therein. In his less heralded book, The Gift of Black Folk, Dubois insisted that the gifts that “the Negro” brought to America were singularly spiritual.
Of course, from a 21st century lens this smacks of essentialism. That said, however, Dubois’ arguments also enable an alternate reading of the Harlem Renaissance, illuminating its certain spiritual grammar. At the start of the book’s final chapter, fittingly named “The Gift of the Spirit,” Dubois argues, “Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality that the Negro has injected into American life and civilization.” (italics mine) There are so many layers of significance to unpeel in this short sentence alone. Indeed, Dubois begins this task in the remainder of the chapter.
Yet beyond the author’s arguments, Dubois’ particular take on “The Gift of the Spirit” points to a spiritual grammar displayed by Alain Locke and others who sought to interpret the New Negro. Also in 1925, Locke edited what has come to be known as the “bible” of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. In both the foreword and first chapter of an anthology that totaled almost five hundred pages, he framed the entire enterprise as spiritual. Spirit-talk pervades these pages. Attesting to both its great vigor and vacuity, in places this spiritual grammar appeals to Africa, taking inspiration from the “ancestral arts” of Ivory Coast, Congo and elsewhere. Other instances reveal an indebtedness to the rhetorics of German Romanticism. In this latter view, spirit-talk seems to evince a hedging of bets that the New Negro was evidence of a new racial zeitgeist. If nothing else, for Alain Locke the best of both worlds—Africa and Europe—were apparent in Harlem. This was the very spirit of the New Negro. “Harlem isn’t typical, but it is prophetic,” he insisted. Yet Locke’s arguments were more about race than geography. Harlem was but a key epicenter for the New Negro movement, a cultural, political and racial project that at its theoretical core was spiritual—it was about the forging of “a new race-spirit.” The final paragraph of Locke’s “Foreword” captured this best, “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing… There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart.”
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