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.
From his seminal work, this passage reflects on the societal consequences of neglecting or improperly guiding the education of the disadvantaged.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.