Yet to tyrannize over such minorities, to browbeat and insult them, to call that government a democracy which makes majority votes an excuse for crushing ideas and individuality and self-development, is manifestly a peculiarly dangerous perversion of the real democratic ideal.
Du Bois warns against the dangers of using majority rule to suppress minority voices and individuality.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.
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.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.