One year before the essay “Strivings of the Negro People” was published in 1897, Plessy vs. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation where the services were supposedly equal in quality. This is where “separate but equal” originated from. The author of this essay, W.E.B. DuBois, was a prominent African-American political figure during this time and he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. This organization’s main goal was to overturn the decision of Plessy vs. Ferguson. This essay is thought of as a response to that court decision.
The intended audience for this essay was white people who were open to hearing these stories, or who were “on the fence” on black issues. DuBois used emotional appeals such as pathos to attempt to sway his audience to share his way of thinking, or at least open their minds to different perspectives. At this time in society, blacks and whites were still very much unequal and tensions were high. He couldn’t provide science for them or any concrete evidence, so he had to use emotional appeals. By using personal testimony and emotional discussion, DuBois tries to invoke empathy with people who may not share any hardships or any of the same perspectives. This can be a very hard thing to do, because people who don’t experience the same things as other people can be either stubborn or ignorant.
DuBois admired fellow intellectual Booker T. Washington, but eventually distanced himself from his “accommodationist” way of thinking. He took a more assertive stand for blacks around the time he published this essay. DuBois stressed the need for the right to vote and the necessity for higher education for black people. Even though it’s never explicitly mentioned in his writing, his words challenge the court case Plessy vs. Ferguson. He could’ve gotten killed for this, he had to hold back due to the time period.
DuBois uses emotion in his essay. For example, he talks about his childhood. He discusses how he was treated as a black child in New England. He writes, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different than the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” “With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, ‘Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?’” Childhood is a time of your life where you are (ideally) supposed to be carefree and naive and not have a worry in the world. This was not true for Black children during this time. They didn’t get the same experiences that White children had. Hoping to find common ground on the value of childhood, DuBois made sure to include this in his essay.
I believe his aim of argument was to convince. He wanted to convince (white) people to understand and see the oppression and hardships that Black people had faced. If people weren’t experiencing it for themselves, then they weren’t necessarily concerned with the topic. A lot of white people just watched as it happened and didn’t do much, partly because it was normal in society back then. As more and more Black writers published works, and Black political figures took office, things started to change and people started to listen.
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