Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Naked
Ignorant
Hands
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Time
American
Achieve
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
America
Man
Problem
" I was born free. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Born
Free
I Was Born
" One ever feels his twoness - 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Two
Alone
American
" If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort? "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Black
Teachers
People
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Death
Men
Problem
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Men
Long
Battle
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Best
Great
America
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Picture
Labor
Land
" 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
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
City
Two
Three
" To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Mighty
Play
Weak
" 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? "
W. E. B. Du Bois
People
Leadership
Work
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Work
Education
Knowledge
" A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Classic
Again
Book
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
History
Learning
Men
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Youth
Planning
Teacher
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Push
Progress
Man
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Impossible
Cotton
Day
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Freedom
Action
Men
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
College
God
Training
" My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Army
Revolution
England
" I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. 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 the possibility of infinite development. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Gift
Men
Soul
" Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Men
House
Training
" 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. Du Bois
Hardships
Race
Poor
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Men
Good
Effort
" I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Childhood
Happy
Acceptance
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Race
Beginning
Black
" Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.' "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Daily
War
Place
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Thoughts
Strength
American