Quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois

The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro peoples. Archæological

THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life.

Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave, But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.

rich and bitter depth of their experience, the

But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?

Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth today?

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

XV. FOUNDING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL How the freedman yearned to learn and know, and with the guiding hand of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Northern school-marm, helped establish the Public School in the South and taught his own teachers in the New England college transplanted to the black South.

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.

By straining his political power to the utmost, the Negro got a public school system and got it because that was one clear object which he understood and which no bribery or chicanery could seduce him from advocating and insisting upon season in and out.

Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. 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.

We have here a wonderful industrial machine, but a machine quickly rather than carefully built, formed of forcing rather than of growth, involving sinful and unnecessary expense. Better smaller production and more equitable distribution; better fewer miles of railway and more honor, truth, and liberty; better fewer millionaires and more contentment

John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost to-day.

You had better—all you people of the South— prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled— this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.

a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal.

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

In a republic people precede their government. Throughout the war the people demanded more stringent and more energetic measures than the administration was prepared to adopt. They called for emancipation before it was proclaimed;for a Freedman's Bureau before it was organized; for a Civil Rights bill before it was passed, and for impartial sufferage before it was finally, by act of Congress, secured.

the United States succeeded by State action in prohibiting the slave-trade from 1798 to 1803, in furthering the cause of abolition, and in preventing the fitting out of slave-trade expeditions in United States ports. The country had good cause to congratulate itself.

the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.