It was simply human decency and I had to be thankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, with saving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood--and this was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919.
Du Bois acknowledges the kindness he experienced in Paris, contrasting it with the cruelty faced by Black Americans.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.