S1E4 - “I Sit with Shakespeare”

Season 1, Episode 4

Chi attempts to fix a problem she’s been having while teaching W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Shakespeare, a time-traveling dog, and dislike of overalls are all involved. So are the reparative potential of reading the classics and a one-hundred-year-old pedagogical controversy.

Sources and references:

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book VI “Of the Training of Black Men”

for more on the Penn School, see the Penn Center’s website

Rossa Cooley, School Acres, pp. 12 and 22

The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

Mount Pisgah is mentioned in Deuteronomy 34:1

Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book XIV, “The Sorrow Songs”

Sonia Sanchez, “Listen to Big Black at s, f, State”

Desmond Jagmohan, “Making Bricks Without Straw: Booker T. Washington and the Politics of the Disenfranchised,” pp. 8-9

For the taxonomy of classical references in The Souls of Black Folk, see Carrie Cowherd, “The Wings of Atlanta: Classical References in The Souls of Black Folk” in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard

David Withun, Coworkers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois

Keith Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois