W E B Du Bois Quotes

I was born free.
If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.
If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
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.
It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.
Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.
My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.
No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.
North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.
Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.
Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
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AuthorName
W. E. B. Du Bois
Profession
Writer
BirthDate
23 February, 1868
DeathDate
27 August, 1963
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