I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois declares his personal strength and refusal to be intimidated by life's challenges or the pervasive racial barrier.
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Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
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.
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.
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.