W. E. B. Du Bois
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.
These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.
If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.
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.
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.
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.
Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.Collection: Disappointment
Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.Collection: Ignorance
There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.Collection: Success
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.Collection: Future
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.Collection: Teacher
There is no force equal to a woman determined to riseCollection: Determined
Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.Collection: Thinking
Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.Collection: Men
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.Collection: Harvest Time
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.Collection: Liberty
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Men
Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.Collection: Lying
Ignorance is a cure for nothing.Collection: Ignorance
I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.Collection: Laughter
In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.Collection: Party
Men must not only know, they must act.Collection: Men
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.Collection: Dream
The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin--the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.Collection: Determination
Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.Collection: Art
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 in the possibility of infinite development.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Honesty
Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stands up and protests. The protest need not be merely physical-the throwing of stones and bullets-if it is mental, spiritual; if it expresses itself in silent, persistent dissatisfaction, the cost to the oppressor is terrific.Collection: Spiritual
One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell.Collection: Dream
All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.Collection: Art
Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?Collection: Justice
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.Collection: Evil
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the 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 imprudence and cruelty.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Wall
The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.Collection: Christian
The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.Collection: Dark
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.Collection: America
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.Collection: College
If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.Collection: Want
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.Collection: Gunpowder
Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.Collection: Art
The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.Collection: Color
We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.Collection: Simple