W.E.B. Du Bois

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader.

If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone.

The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.

Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.

The South is not “solid”; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.

Furthermore, to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South.

The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it.

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.