ld,--a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,--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.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the
older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America
has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his
Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro
blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being
cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of
Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here
in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,--it is the contradiction of
double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan--on the
one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood
and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig
for a poverty-stricken horde--could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempt