|
bc624e4
|
XVI. BACK TOWARD SLAVERY How civil war in the South began again--indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
a931a2d
|
XVII. THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORY How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
3fecc59
|
For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,--wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School."
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
bfa8be6
|
What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions?
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
2ad65c2
|
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,--all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
edd3587
|
The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
47b4177
|
II. THE WHITE WORKER How America became a laborer's Promised Land; and flocking here from all the world the white workers competed with black slaves, with the new floods of foreigners, and with growing exploitation, until they fought to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
3fa9717
|
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.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
dfd9067
|
III. THE PLANTER How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
6c76bbc
|
Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,--What shall be done with Negroes?
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
909f105
|
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
e1d1beb
|
For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
0be820c
|
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
0ef851b
|
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. 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.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
60f4ce4
|
To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
fe1ecd0
|
For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
835b5dd
|
But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and"
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
c705cd9
|
Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
26ea97b
|
The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro peoples. Archaeological
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
2823c8c
|
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.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
e3379cf
|
XIV. COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF PROPERTY How, After the war, triumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of death that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war; and how revolt against this anarchy became reaction against democracy, North and South, and delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
8fccef7
|
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
0697f2e
|
I. THE BLACK WORKER How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
b21a7e3
|
IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
08a48c1
|
V. THE COMING OF THE LORD How the Negro became free because the North could not win the Civil War if he remained in slavery. And how arms in his hands, and the prospect of arms in a million more black hands, brought peace and emancipation to America.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
00ed4f2
|
An Attack on the fundamental democratic foundation-Modern European white industry does not even theoretically seek the good of all but simply of all Europeans.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
457bceb
|
1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In ..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
fdcb161
|
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
3f2a8fc
|
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
f2a6af5
|
As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. The Age of Miracles began with Fisk and ended with Germany. I was bursting with the joy of living. I seemed to ride in conquering might. I was captain..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
2239f33
|
My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real condition of my people. I realized t..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
0827793
|
Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that wh..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
9b912c2
|
Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the statement "I am white," the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality? Only when this basic, iron rule is involved is our defense of right nation-wide and prompt. Murder may swagger, theft may rule and prostitution may flourish and the nation gives but spasmodic, intermittent and lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black or the thief brown or the violator of womanhood ..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
1061c39
|
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
52ea852
|
Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880. Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the name of "the noble-minded men of several nations," to introduce commerce and civilization. What came of it? "Rubber and murder, slavery in its worst form,"..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
efdde35
|
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsv..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
83b75f3
|
As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture--back of all culture,--stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,--these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of whic..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
522ac38
|
The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the world's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the real and greatest cause. Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely,..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
912e88f
|
A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.
|
|
humanity
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
e6863d1
|
The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races.
|
|
wwi
exploitation
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
3b2bb46
|
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,--making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,--rather a great religion, a wo..
|
|
hypocrisy
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
6bfa827
|
The real argument for democracy is, then, that in the people we have the source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers of men must have. A given people today may not be intelligent, but through a democratic government that recognizes, not only the worth of the individual to himself, but the worth of his feelings and experiences to all, they can educate, not only the individual unit, but generation after generation, until..
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
9e05e78
|
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |
|
b8f93cd
|
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!
|
|
|
W.E.B. Du Bois |