Quotes About Du Bois

As American conservatives have felt the ebb of cultural power away from them, they have come to feel watched and judged. They do not like it. "How does it feel to be a problem?" memorably asked W. E. B. Du Bois.

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

Dubois, later in his life, would join the Communist party and renounce his American citizenship. His 'integration at all costs' message would, decades later, continue to influence the community's self-perception.

The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.

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

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!

men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy- bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver- age was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Between the tenets of those two men [W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington], a race strived to untangle its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.

Du Bois spoke about the relationship of black disenfranchisement to cheap surplus labor in the South; Celia Parker Woolley delineated the relationship between race, women's rights, and labor. Wells-Barnett began her talk by enumerating the 3,284 men, women, and children who had been lynched since Reconstruction, and she illustrated the relationship between lynching and the lack of citizenship rights.