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" From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? "

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" The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

Ignorance

Men

Group

" In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln. "

" The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. "

" School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. "

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

" The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. "

" An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. "

" To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. "

" 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. "

" I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community. "

" All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. "

" 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. "

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

" My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution. "

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

" 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. "

" It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana. "

" In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment. "

" If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known. "

" Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage. "

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

" 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. "

" A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

Rights

Credit

" 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. "

" The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. "

" How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers. "

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