Souls of Black Folk, A Graphic Interpretation
by WEB Du Bois, Paul Peart-Smith, edited by Paul Buhle
Rutgers University Press, £12.95

WRITER, publisher and editor Paul Buhle has been editing books of graphic non-fiction for over 20 years.

Before that, he occasionally worked with underground comic artists, most notably when he was part of the collective that published the late 1960s to early 1970s Radical America magazine. 

Many of Buhle’s more recent works are biographies with subjects including Johnny Appleseed, Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Robeson. Over this period of time, Buhle has worked with numerous artists, co-editors and writers. 

His most recent collaborative work — a graphic presentation of WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk — is a masterpiece. It breathes a life into one of world literature’s most important texts unlike any other previous version. 

As so many similar works have already done, this edition of a classic introduces it to a new audience. In addition to a brief history of comics and their graphic successors, Buhle reflects on the meaning of each chapter written by Du Bois, and succinctly each introduction places the reader inside the text and prepares them for the section to come. 

Buhle’s collaborators in this work include Herb Boyd, a journalist, teacher and author of over a dozen books, including the classic Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination, and the 1995 graphic work titled Black Panthers for Beginners, that I heartily recommend. 

The illustrator of this edition of The Souls of Black Folk is Paul Peart-Smith, whose previous work includes art for the Judge Dredd comic series and as a game developer. Peart-Smith’s work in this text expresses the pain, frustration and the joy Du Bois’ text is known for. 

The art is both realistic and dreamlike, the shades of the colours vaguely impressionistic; sometimes the shapes are starkly outlined in a thin line and in other panels the images seem to arise from the background, somewhere between illusion and fact, both ethereal and real. 

Last, but certainly not least of the collaborators is Jonathan Scott Holloway, president of Rutgers University, whose introduction to the text provides a biography of Du Bois and a brief discussion of the text and its meaning today.

Then there’s Du Bois’ text itself. The Souls of Black Folk is a collection of essays reflecting on the state of black men and women in the United States in the early 20th century. 

There are political reflections on the nature of progress, tales of individuals beaten down by the ugly reality of individual racism, commentary on the best means for black people to improve their lot in post-slavery US, and celebratory contemplations on black people’s successes in the nation we call the United States. 

Underlying each and every section is the phrase first introduced by Du Bois in this book: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

As everyone but the most ignorant and racist would concur, this sentence remains disturbingly relevant 23 years into the 21st century.

Indeed, reading The Souls of Black Folk in 2023 reminds the reader that the system of racial oppression in the United States is so much more than the all too many instances of individual racism, the constant reminders of how white supremacy is tightly woven into US history, and even the never-ending brutality of the police against black people. 

As Du Bois says: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” 

It is in the same essay where Du Bois celebrates the cultural and other contributions of black Americans, writing: “There is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.”

This retelling of The Souls of Black Folk deserves a place among the pantheon of great graphic texts like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alan Moore’s The Watchmen.

In creating this work, the collaborators have once again ensured the continuing relevance of Du Bois’ work in the conversation around white supremacy and the United States. 

One can only hope it gets the prominence it deserves.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem. He lives in Vermont.