The Other Souls of Black Folk: George Washington Woodbey and the Spirit of Socialism

Abstract

The ideas of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois have long dominated discussions about Black political thought at the turn of the twentieth century. However, little attention has been paid to these thinkers’ implicit commitments to capitalism, which brings their apparently divergent perspectives into closer alignment. Black socialist preacher and former slave George Washington Woodbey’s internationally acclaimed booklet What to Do and How to Do It (1903), which was published the same year as Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, brings a new perspective to the Du Bois–Washington debate. While the East Coast titans inadvertently recapitulated the capitalist order, Woodbey’s West Coast Christian socialist counterpoint to their secular pro-capitalist assumptions invites new discussions about the period known as both the Progressive Era and the nadir of American race relations, which has ongoing implications for contemporary debates about the intersection of race, religion, and capitalism in the United States.