Jan 1, 1903
Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?
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
The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity.
Jan 1, 1903
To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps.
Jan 1, 1903
And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.
Jan 1, 1903
They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.
Jan 1, 1903
They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.
Jan 1, 1903
Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly.
Jan 1, 1903
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.
Jan 1, 1903
Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Jan 1, 1903
If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?
Jan 1, 1903
Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we…
Jan 1, 1903
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand…