Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois poses a fundamental question about the identity and historical development of the United States in the absence of its Black population.
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Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.