ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the scenes of lynching, death, and burial depicted in The Souls of Black Folk represent W. E. B. Du Bois's emotional response to the appalling black mortality rates that he encountered as a social scientist. Du Bois was one of the few voices arguing against racist theories of death. Du Bois first refuted the myths about blacks and death in 1896, when he was instructed to study the morbidity and mortality of the black population of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, written in response to racist propaganda, tries to refute the association of African Americans with death. In nineteenth-century sentimental literature, sympathy often achieved the effect Du Bois envisioned. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt also centres the opportunity for interracial recognition on a black corpse. Du Bois and W. Chesnutt both lament the lack of cross-racial understanding and sympathy that results from social segregation.
