“By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom--the shadow… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.” — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share
“Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.” — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
“Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to… — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share
“perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.” — W.E.B. Du Bois Copy Share Image
