. Du Bois made this famous statement concerning this "double consciousness" on the black identity:One feels his two-ness- an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, Norton Anthology, pg.1687-1688) Du Bois also challenges black men to perform their duties, and questions Washington’s leadership in the following excerpt:The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,- a forward movement to oppose part of the work of their greatest leader… So far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,- so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,- we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. (Du Bois, The Norton Anthology, pg.1701)Black Reconstruction is a Marxist interpretation of the post Civil War era in the South. According to Aptheker("The Historian"), it contains four main themes:1. The American Negro not only was the cause of the Civil War but a prime factor in enabling the North to win it.2. The Negro was the only effective tool which could be used for the immediate restoration of the federal union after the war.3. The enfranchisement of the freedmen after the war was one of the greatest steps toward democracy taken in the nineteenth century.4. The attempts to retrace that step, disfranchising the Negro and reducing him to caste conditions, are the deeds which make the South today the nation's social problem Number One....Personally, I find Du Bois’s views truly remarkable. After completing this paper, I have concluded that he was a definite founding father of the Civil Rights Movement. Evidently, his views for the betterment of the black communi...
