THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK | Book Cover Recreation
I got the honor to create a cover of the book “The Souls Of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois commissioned by the Ann Arbor District Library for their 2022 Summer Game. The Summer Game is an annual summer reading program for kids and teens—encouraging them to continue reading over the summer break.⠀⠀
THE PROCESS: One of the initial thoughts I had when I started to brainstorm ideas for this project were the EYES. I thought about the phrase "the eyes are the window to the souls". I thought about how now especially with covid & wearing masks were essentially forced to look into the eyes of one another & see each-other. There is a certain uncomfortable reminder of our humanity when we’re forced to look into the eyes of another. We’re reminded to see them. See them as human just like us. This is a reminder that we’re all deserving of dignity.
However, in this country, dignity hasn’t always been felt or given to black people. This creation is a reminder that my fellow black humans and I are deserving of being seen and treated with dignity!⠀⠀⠀
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This all correlates with Du Bois intention for his book. Here is an except from the introduction that sums it up perfectly by Ibram X. Kendi
— Du Bois stared into the grisly faces of the racist past and present and decreed that blacks were not soulless beasts. "Ain't I a human?" he seemed to be asking, just as fifty years earlier the legendary black feminist Sojourner Truth famously asked, "Ain't I a woman?" In publishing The Souls of Black Folk, on April 18, 1903, Du Bois argued, implicitly, that the world needs to know the humanity of black folk by listening carefully to the "strivings" in their souls.And we can hear in the book the strivings in the soul of Du Bois as much as we can hear the strivings in the souls of other black folk. —⠀