Jan 1, 1903
They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by…
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
We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains.
Jan 1, 1903
Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool.
Jan 1, 1903
Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement?
Jan 1, 1903
The foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure.
Jan 1, 1903
That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth.
Jan 1, 1903
I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation…
Jan 1, 1903
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these…
Jan 1, 1903
And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this…
Jan 1, 1903
And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of…
Jan 1, 1903
When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution.