I go forty blocks to Marshall's, but the Committee of Fourteen closes Marshall's; they say white women frequent it.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “I go forty blocks to Marshall's, but the Committee of Fourteen closes Marshall's; they say white women frequent it.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois illustrates the barriers he faces in seeking social spaces due to racial prejudice.
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So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
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.
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.