All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in…”
Editor's note · Context
This reflection on the post-Civil War era critiques the failure to invest resources in Black citizenship and solve racial issues.
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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.
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…