War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,—this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law.
This passage from his influential work critiques the violent and destructive outcomes often masked by claims of civilizing and evangelizing non-European peoples.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin…
To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.
I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.
And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.