Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

Care

Black

Stand

" If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort? "

" Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. "

" St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud. "

" The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder. "

" 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. "

" Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. "

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

" After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. "

" A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. "

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

" Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder. "

" As a race, the Negroes are not lazy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men. "

" 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. "

" The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. "

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

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