W.E.B. Du Bois: “So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say…”

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.

Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to…