 While Du Bois presents double-consciousness in the 1903 texts as a problem for black folks generally given conditions of segregation and historically persisting inequality, a closer inspection shows that he also suggests that the phenomenon is specific to black leadership or those who are most fully caught between the white world and the world of color—those who have deliberately taken on the project of “the moral uplift” of the “backward” black masses, and who stand as “representatives” of these two “worlds” one to another. Much of what he says in illustration of his original claim about double-consciousness in the “Strivings” passage features educated, “better” Negroes: illustrative examples cited in the subsequent paragraphs include that of the black artisan, the Negro minister or doctor, the “would be black savant” and the black artist. Du Bois also devotes several chapters in Souls to detailed characterizations of the inner soul struggles of those, both actual and fictional, who would be or were in fact leaders of their people—Washington, Crummell, and the fictional John Jones. Yet much of the force of the initial claim for double-consciousness in the “Strivings” text is the universality of its attribution there to “the Negro in this American world”.