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1897fe1
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Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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eb380e9
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We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smar..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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068b21f
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The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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b234a9d
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I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. No..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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baf8931
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We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know of these millions,--of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only lear..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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96a261f
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With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable ..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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db655bf
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The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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34cdf27
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For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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10e73df
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he question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men?
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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9179eee
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no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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ee83a55
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So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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54884a4
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And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,--and behold the suicide of a race!
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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34dd67d
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I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard enough,--is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,--is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,--thou, O Death?
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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2ee2b77
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A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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1d5e82c
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How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,--is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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f96b2e1
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Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song--soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift ..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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9e416ac
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coign
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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bd40abc
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Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart. MRS. BROWNING.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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9730bad
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South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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3ca0e4a
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The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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433737b
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The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. Such
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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5aa7c8a
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The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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b1a8d46
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was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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af37a46
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It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters--a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclam..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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062ba81
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rich and bitter depth of their experience, the
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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919c990
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this noticeable in the South, where theology and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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c66e514
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And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,--all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,--who is good? not that men are ignorant,--what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men. He
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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4ede5de
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Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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9ca3778
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How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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0473bbe
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Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked "For White People Only."
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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73dc162
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One ever feels his two-ness - 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.
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race-and-racism-in-america
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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2e537c7
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whilom
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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e14784a
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Golden apples are beautiful-I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field-and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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412411b
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Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion and ..
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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7a6020a
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position,--for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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7ce860c
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until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill." --
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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267cbef
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I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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aebced1
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found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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3f282bb
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In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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1236fae
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War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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d3100b8
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the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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7f5b57a
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The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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1b0d3d7
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not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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b9c57bc
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The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork," he notes,"
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W.E.B. Du Bois |