Jan 1, 1903
I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death!
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Public Record
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor at Atlanta University and over the course of his life wrote many books and articles. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1903
Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort.
Jan 1, 1903
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months distant from the All-life,—we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the divine, my wife and I.
Jan 1, 1903
I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life.
Jan 1, 1903
Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land…
Jan 1, 1903
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,—a Negro and a Negro’s son.
Jan 1, 1903
And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
Jan 1, 1903
Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked…
Jan 1, 1903
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.
Jan 1, 1903
Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to…
Jan 1, 1903
They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.
Jan 1, 1903
What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence.