A Journal of Research in Africana Studies
Freedom: Volume 3
Freedom and Unfreedom in the Black Belt: Du Bois as Proto-Criminologist
By Shuntavia N. James, Ph.D.
Fort Valley State University
Published in Freedom: Volume 3
Keywords
Surveillance, Critical Criminology, Racialized Punishment, Black Belt, Carceral Studies
Abstract
This article re-reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a criminological text, arguing that his journey through Albany, Georgia, offers an early theory of racialized punishment and carceral power. While Du Bois is most often situated within sociology, history, and literature, I contend that his reflections on the veil, double consciousness, and the Black Belt anticipate core concerns of critical criminology—surveillance, criminalization, and structural inequality. In the Black Belt, Du Bois encountered a community legally emancipated yet constrained by debt peonage, vagrancy laws, labor coercion, and racial terror—conditions that illuminate a continuum between freedom and unfreedom. Conceptually, the veil functions as a criminological metaphor for racialized surveillance and misrecognition; double consciousness captures the juridical tension of citizenship under suspicion; and the Black Belt reveals how race, land, and labor converge to criminalize space itself. Through close reading and theoretical translation, the article positions Du Bois as a foundational—though frequently unacknowledged—thinker of racialized punishment. Re-situating Souls within criminology not only bridges Africana thought and carceral studies but also reframes freedom as a central analytic problem for the discipline: a condition unevenly distributed and routinely managed through law.