And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
This quote offers a philosophical reflection on the inherent revolutionary and disruptive nature of education for all people, acknowledging the South's fear of educated Black individuals.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.