Quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

I am a Bolshevik.

It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section.

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.

There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.

Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.

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.

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?