Jan 1, 1903
And their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.
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.
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Jan 1, 1903
In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.
Jan 1, 1903
They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner.
Jan 1, 1903
In that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen youth and left age and childhood there.
Jan 1, 1903
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.
Jan 1, 1903
Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly.
Jan 1, 1903
They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.
Jan 1, 1903
And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Jan 1, 1903
South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.
Jan 1, 1903
Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial selfishness, stunted by the…