The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

This summary covers “Brother-Man Magic,” “We Sing Your Praises High,” “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Goddamnit,” “In This Spot,” and “Feminism, Womanism, or Whatever.”

Although Ailey intends to forgive David and take him back after making him suffer for a few months, she learns that he is seeing someone else. This prompts her to go back to Chris. After Ailey obtains birth control from a free clinic, she and Chris begin a sexual relationship. They plan to attend Routledge University—an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) where Uncle Root used to teach—in the fall. However, when Chris gets accepted to Princeton, they break up.

In a brief section that focuses on Uncle Root’s past, the narrator describes his early years as a scholar, when his hot temper and inability to get along with department chairs and administrators kept him moving from college to college. When he and his wife Olivia began teaching at Routledge, the pattern nearly repeated itself, but then he discovered a complimentary note from W.E.B. Du Bois to the school’s founder. Uncle Root took the great scholar’s words of praise as a sign and dedicated the rest of his career to teaching at Routledge.

During her freshman year at Routledge, Ailey makes new friends, including her roommates (Keisha and Roz) and enjoys some of her classes, but she also struggles with parts of her social life and education. In a student body where the women outnumber the men 10-to-1, the men seem to flock toward the lightest women. In fact, photos from the school’s earliest years show a student body so light-skinned that Routledge could almost be mistaken for a white college.

When Ailey and other students try to raise this subject with Dean Walters, the professor who teaches their freshman orientation class, he refuses to engage with them, instead singing the praises of the school and its founders, sisters Adeline and Judith Hutchinson. He acts annoyed when anyone criticizes the school, such as when a student named Abdul insists that Routledge should not have started offering a vocational track just to reassure their white Georgian neighbors that Black students were not going to get too educated. While Dean Walters calls this clever, Abdul characterizes it as the behavior of an “Uncle Tom.”

Ailey and her roommates begin making friends with Abdul and another male student named Pat. They have to guard themselves carefully, however, because the women at the school spread rumors about each other to better position themselves with the limited number of men. In a school of just 1,000 students, rumors ruin reputations quickly.

Ailey comes to love Dr. Oludara’s class. On the first day of class, Dr. Oludara takes the students to a place where one of the school’s founders, Adeline Routledge, was going to build the school until she found that it was soaked with the blood of former slaves. She therefore decided to leave it undisturbed “so it could heal” (242). Dr. Oludara’s passionate description of the evils visited on the site brings Ailey to tears. In another session, the students spiritedly debate feminism, some saying that the movement is only for white women, who make no effort to include Black women in their goals and actions. Ailey defends feminism, and Abdul is her primary opponent, loudly stating that Black women belong in the home supporting their men.

When Ailey tries to rush a sorority with Keisha and Roz, she meets resistance: A woman named Tiffany leads a group in mocking Ailey about her sister’s drug misuse. Although Ailey expected hazing, this goes too far. Knowing that Tiffany is interested in Abdul, Ailey catches his attention soon after the incident and begins a relationship with him to get back at her.