To-day,” he said, with a smile, “the world cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true.
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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Finally he urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and denominational bickering.
The question was, then, he added reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century.
The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were far different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas of human brotherhood and destiny.
Here is my duty to Altamaha plain before me; perhaps they’ll let me help settle the Negro problems there,—perhaps they won’t. ‘I will go in to the King, which is not according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.’” And then he mused and…
And if he had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay open before men?
Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?
If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood!
A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled.
With all your professions, one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us.
You will not understand us at the South,” he said half impatiently, as if continuing an argument.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those who walk within the Veil.