ABSTRACT
W. E. B. Du Bois’ epic narrative, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), richly characterizes the legacy of social, psychological and economic hardship for African Americans of the era. In describing that experience, Du Bois coined the psychic phenomenon of “double consciousness” (p. 14), wherein African Americans sought to neutralize notions of inferiority and hopelessness in a backdrop of White supremacy. In Du Bois’ mind, the best route to dismantle racism was for African Americans to “ground themselves in their African and Negro culture before attempting to navigate within the larger society” (Alridge, 1999, p. 370). By centering the positive effects of African and Negro culture, African Americans would be in a position to navigate the racial stratifications of American society and challenge its racism at the same time. The practical wisdom of this philosophical approach so captured the imaginations of Black people that it gelled social patterns of thought and behavior. Fast forward 60 years later to Martin Luther King, Jr. sitting on a wooden bench in the Birmingham City Jail. In that moment of solitude, he struggles with the legacy and experience of double consciousness. During this dark hour of the Civil Rights Movement, King is discerning what it meant to simultaneously be a “Negro” and “American” in the struggle for a place at the table of American social life. In 1903, Du Bois believed that the development of double consciousness could lead to a self-affirming way for Blacks to transcend the boundaries of race. King (1963), challenged anxious co-workers that regardless of racial affiliation, all of humanity is “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (p. 77). King, in a moment of prophetic clarity seemed to say: racism may have caused African
Americans to have dual identities, but issues of difference can not be allowed to sever the ties between us if our shared project of dismantling oppression is to happen.
