Quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois

We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.

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.

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.

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing—a childless mother.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;

And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame.

not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

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.

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.

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.

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. 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.

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.

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.

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.

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen!

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Comrade, you and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are here on Earth.

Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not Is he white? but Can he work? When men ask artists, not Are they black? but Do they know?

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.

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.

it is easier to do ill than well in the world.

Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center...One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.