Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them if they break our idiotic conventions.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible…”
Editor's note · Context
This passage critiques societal conventions that force intelligent individuals into childlessness or moral dilemmas.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
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.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.