Double-Consciousness

"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk

When Du Bois wrote these words in 1903 explaining the fractured identity of an African-American, he alluded to the constant white lens through which all black society was filtered in United States society. This sentiment is propagated throughout Sellers' reporting in The Reflector. As editor of Charlottesville's only African-American publication, he struggled to carve adequate space that black society alone could fill without the depreciating presence of white prejudice and domination. This was no easy task. In a period of systematic discrimination and suppression, Sellers could not blithely report on national events obviously skewed by popular press. Instead, he reported on events, large and small, through a concentrated black lens in an effort to assert African-American identity in a white-washed media.

Taking Du Bois' famous words into account, Sellers' motivation for the obvious slant he gave to his reporting gains new meaning and significance in the canon of African-American press:



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