On the record
To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted.
Said by
W.E.B. Du Bois
Source
gutenberg.orgW.E.B. Du Bois: “To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly…”
Editor's note · Context
This quote addresses the exclusion of African Americans from cultural institutions, emphasizing the barriers they faced.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Jan 1, 1903
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
Jan 1, 1903
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.
Jan 1, 1903
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
Jan 1, 1903
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.