The Souls of Black Folk · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois.
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The Narrator
major
Also known as Unknown, I, mine, myself
He is the book's guiding consciousness: a Black intellectual who has lived behind the Veil in both the rural South and the urban North, speaking now as witness, now as analyst. His defining tension is the 'double aim' he names so precisely—the pull to lift his own people while answering a white world that despises the very beauty he loves. That unresolved contradiction drives the early essays, turning each chapter into both confession and diagnosis.
Booker T. Washington
major
Also known as Mr. Booker T. Washington, Mr. Washington
Washington stands as the dominant figure in Black public life, the architect of Tuskegee's industrial program and the broker of a fragile peace with white Southern power. The narrator admires his rise from slavery and his practical genius, yet bristles at a philosophy that trades political rights and higher aspiration for material gain and white goodwill. Their disagreement—respectful, painful, unresolved—anchors the book's central argument about what freedom actually requires.
Alexander Crummell
major
Also known as Alexander, Crummell
Crummell appears first at a Wilberforce commencement, tall and black and unmistakably well-bred, and the narrator bows before him as before a seer. His life story is the book's most intimate portrait: a boy shadowed by a bitter father's cruelty, refused at a white school, wandering fourscore years within the Veil yet never surrendering his vision of Black dignity. He embodies the possibility that character and faith can survive what the color line inflicts.
Josie
supporting
Also known as Josie
Josie arrives first on the school's opening morning, one of nearly thirty children on rough plank benches in a log hut that once sheltered corn. She is a 'child-woman,' already burdened with work and worry, yet her hunger to become a student at Fisk hovers above her like a star. Her quiet determination gives the narrator's Southern school chapter its tenderest stakes: what the Veil costs a single eager mind.
Sam Scott
supporting
Also known as Sam
Sam Scott works the rocky Georgia hills the narrator rides through, one of the many Black tillers whose labor enriches others while barely feeding their own. His circumstances expose the economic machinery—crop liens, uncertain wages, the constant threat of falling further—that turns freedom into a slow foreclosure. He matters because his struggle is the book's ground truth: the abstract 'Negro problem' made flesh in a man trying to keep his family fed.
The Judge
supporting
Also known as the Judge, Judge, Judge Henderson
The Judge represents local legal authority in the rural South—the man whose word settles disputes and whose household sets the terms of Black-white contact. When the narrator dines after him rather than with him, the small exclusion speaks louder than any statute. His presence in the early chapters shows how the Veil operates not through spectacle but through ordinary, unremarkable custom.
Oliver O. Howard
supporting
Also known as Howard, Oliver Howard, General Howard
Howard stands at the hinge between Emancipation's promise and its betrayal: the official charged with making freedom real for four million people, armed with a bureau, a budget, and dwindling political cover. Du Bois measures him against the freedman's unbounded faith in liberty, showing how the machinery of Reconstruction delivered contradictory advice where land and law were needed. His tenure matters because it dramatizes the gap between the nation's proclaimed ideals and the 'deep disappointment' that settled over Black life in the decades after the war.
Sam Hose
minor
Also known as Sam
A Black man whose lynching is referenced as a symbol of racial terror in the South.
Mandy
minor
Also known as Mandy
A Black woman in the rural South, likely a domestic worker or family member.
John Jones
minor
Also known as Jones, John
A Black man in the rural South, possibly a farmer or laborer.
The White John
minor
Also known as John
A white man in the rural South, possibly a landowner or overseer.
Bishop Onderdonk
minor
Also known as Bishop Onderdonk
A historical bishop referenced in the context of religious education for Black people.
Andrew Jackson
minor
Also known as Jackson
Former U.S. president referenced in discussions of democracy and race.
Beriah Green
minor
Also known as Beriah Green
Abolitionist and educator, referenced in the context of early Black education.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
minor
Also known as Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Abolitionist and colonel of the first Black regiment in the Civil War.
Denmark Vesey
minor
Also known as Vesey
Leader of a planned slave revolt in Charleston, cited as a symbol of resistance.
Nat Turner
minor
Also known as Turner
Leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia, referenced as a figure of Black defiance.
Pierce
minor
Also known as Pierce
A white landowner or official in the post-Civil War South.
Jim
minor
Also known as Jim
A Black laborer in the cotton fields whose life reflects the harsh realities of sharecropping.
Uncle Bird
minor
Also known as Uncle Bird Dowell
An elderly Black man in the rural South, a figure of folk wisdom and endurance.
Jennie
minor
Also known as sister Jennie
A young Black woman in the rural South, sister to a local character.
Doc Burke
minor
Also known as Doc, Little Doc
A white doctor in the rural South who interacts with Black characters.
The Burkes
minor
Also known as the Burkes
A white family in the Black Belt, representing local landowning interests.
Fat Reuben
minor
Also known as Reuben
A Black laborer in the cotton fields, known for his physical size and work.
Thenie
minor
Also known as Thenie
A Black woman in the rural South, likely a domestic worker or family member.
Tildy
minor
Also known as Tildy
A Black woman in the rural South, part of the local community.
Brother Dennis
minor
Also known as Brother
A Black church elder in the rural South, a figure of religious leadership.
Luke Black
minor
Also known as Luke Black
A Black farmer in the Black Belt, representing the struggling agricultural class.
Michael
minor
Also known as Michael
A Black laborer in the cotton fields, part of the sharecropping system.
Frederick Douglass
minor
Also known as Douglass
Abolitionist and statesman, cited as a model of Black leadership and oratory.
Senator Ben Tillman
minor
Also known as Ben
White supremacist politician from South Carolina, criticized for his racist policies.
John Brown
minor
Also known as Brown, great awkward John
Abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry is invoked as a symbol of radical resistance.
Commissioner Harris
minor
Also known as Harrison
A government official involved in Reconstruction-era policies in the South.
General Sherman
minor
Also known as Sherman
Union general whose Special Field Orders promised land to freed slaves.
Sells
minor
Also known as Sells
A white merchant or landowner in the rural South.
Price
minor
Also known as Price
A white landowner or official in the post-Civil War South.
Benton
minor
Also known as Benton
A white landowner or official in the post-Civil War South.
Jason
minor
Also known as Jason
A Black man in the rural South, possibly a farmer or laborer.
Jacob
minor
Also known as Jacob
A Black man in the rural South, possibly a farmer or laborer.
Young John Jay
minor
Also known as John
A Black man in the rural South, possibly a farmer or laborer.
