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As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The merchant must be no more pessimist than optimist, since pessimism induces him to hold back his capital but optimism induces him to take such risks that he has more to tear than to hope. Abu al'Fadl Ja'far al-Dimishqi (c. 9th century) Arab writer. The Beauties of Commerce Business pays ... philanthropy begs.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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 -
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
I was born free.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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 -
Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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 -
It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois -
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 -
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 -
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!
W. E. B. Du Bois