Reactionary laws and statutes, often referred to as ‘Jim Crow’ laws (itself a racist slur), began to be implemented from the 1890s onwards to drastically reduce and limit the rights of black Americans. But racism was still rife, and individual states varied greatly in their treatment of black Americans. It was almost forty years since the end of the American Civil War, which had, with Constitutional Amendment XIV, given black men full citizenship and promised equal protection under the law, enshrined in the project of Reconstruction.

The book’s publication in 1903 came at a pivotal moment.

As essay collections return to popularity in recent years, we wanted to bring a best-selling and genre-defining text from this genre to the front of our book club reading list. The meticulous passion and creativity in Du Bois’s language and imagery is thought-provoking, sometimes beautiful and always arresting. It also makes for powerfully immediate reading. This influential book of essays is foundational to the writing and politics of the century(s) that followed. The Souls of Black Folk, from which this week’s ten-minute read is taken, is an important text written in the United States by W.

The souls of black folk