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The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, --refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with
a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to
creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Why did God make me an outcast and
a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod
darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
The history of the American
Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be
lost. 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. 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.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,--else what shall save us from a second slavery?
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Work,
culture, liberty,--all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of
human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large
conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the
body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion
and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,--in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on the Freedmen's Bureau
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. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction
and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on the education of freed African American's following the Civil War
For this much all men know: despite
compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are
peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on the South at the turn of the century
I have
seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the
traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty
and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights
which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
How hard a thing is life to
the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,--is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a
door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three
boards, reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the children--these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England vision of
neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps dangerous,--possibly fatal, for the floor was not
to be trusted.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on his first position as a schoolteacher
I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly
marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on his first position as a schoolteacher
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a
centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned,
but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on the first African-American colleges
The function of the Negro college, then,
is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally,
beyond all this, it must develop men.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
How curious a land is this,--how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed
with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see
that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine
and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations,
that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social
teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but
as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or
consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Some day the 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."
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
At first he was coming at Christmas-time,--but the
vacation proved too short; and then, the next summer,--but times were hard and schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to the next summer, and the next,--till playmates
scattered, and mother grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge's kitchen to work. And still the legend lingered,--"When John comes."
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
And the world whistled in his ears.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there
spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness
which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not
indeed
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it
interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on Booker T. Washington
The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so
passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by readers, --this is the soul of democracy and the
safeguard of modern society.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on criticism of Booker T. Washington
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but
adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work
and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on Booker T. Washington
Mr. Washington withdraws many of the
high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is
advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily
surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on Booker T. Washington
But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right
lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and
urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do
not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are
absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by
continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, 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.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, writing about the beliefs of the critics of Booker T. Washington
It would be unjust to Mr.
Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken
against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the
distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the
Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The
supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro's position; second, industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in
planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,--it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable
before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and
encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, on Booker T. Washington
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