It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.
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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These same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is doing something worth the doing.
Washington’s counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow.
One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much.
Know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned! ****** Hereditary bondsmen!
That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?
The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter.
Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white votes, we certainly can with black votes.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for any such institution at all.