The movement was not a great moral protest against an iniquitous traffic; although it had undoubtedly a strong moral backing, it was primarily a temporary war measure.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The movement was not a great moral protest against an iniquitous traffic; although it had undoubtedly a strong moral…”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois critiques the motivations behind the movement against the slave trade, suggesting it was more a wartime strategy than a moral crusade.
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Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.