ABSTRACT
W. E. B. Du Bois staged a remarkable social and psychological revolution in American thought, especially Black thought, with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Du Bois was larger than life, and his place in American intellectual life is assured, but as people has moved into the twenty-first century it is important to reassess his contributions at that crucial moment at the end of the nineteenth century when the nation stood on the threshold of great change, both internally and externally. Du Bois used "double consciousness" as a term suggestive of intense psychic dimensions, if not trauma. As Du Bois described them, Blacks were "entombed souls looking out from a dark cave". The characterizations connoted the inner and outer worlds that Blacks inhabited. The "dual marginality" theme speaks to a contemporary reality not possible during the height of Du Bois' intellectual ascendency.
