W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

Powerful W. E. B. Du Bois for Daily Growth

About W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was a pioneering African-American scholar, sociologist, activist, and author, who emerged as a leading voice of the Afro-American civil rights movement at the beginning of the 20th century. His multifaceted work covered a wide range of topics including race, class, politics, and culture. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His academic influences include sociologist Max Weber and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas on the social contract significantly shaped his views on race and society. Du Bois's seminal work, "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903), offered an influential interpretation of African-American history and culture and is considered a foundational text in American sociology and literature. Throughout his career, Du Bois was active within various civil rights organizations, including co-founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, which later influenced the creation of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909. As a founding member and editor of the NAACP's official journal, The Crisis, Du Bois used his platform to advocate for racial equality and social justice through powerful essays, articles, and editorials. Du Bois was a prolific writer and published numerous works throughout his lifetime, including "Darkwater" (1920) and "Black Reconstruction in America" (1935). His most significant contribution to the civil rights movement lies in his tireless advocacy for the rights of African Americans through nonviolent means. Du Bois passed away on August 27, 1963, just days before delivering a speech at the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered. His legacy as a scholar, activist, and author continues to be celebrated for his unwavering commitment to racial equality and social justice.

Interpretations of Popular Quotes

"Of all the civil rights struggles in the United States, the most important was the struggle for the black man's soul."

This quote by W.E.B. Du Bois emphasizes that one of the most significant battles during the U.S.'s fight for civil rights was the pursuit of psychological freedom and self-determination for African Americans, often referred to as the struggle for the black man's "soul". In other words, it was essential to change not only their legal status but also their cultural and societal perception, promoting a shift in mindset that would help them reclaim their dignity, identity, and self-worth. This internal transformation was crucial for their overall empowerment and equality within the U.S. society.

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

The quote by W.E.B. Du Bois, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," highlights the racial divide that was prevalent in society during his time and continues to be an issue today. He posits that the primary challenge for the 20th century is finding a solution to address racial discrimination and inequalities that stem from the constructed social construct of race, or the 'color line.' This quote underscores the need to confront and dismantle systems of oppression based on skin color, with a focus on achieving equity and justice for all.

"I believe in God who is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."

This quote by W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent African-American civil rights activist and intellectual, metaphorically expresses his faith that the oppressed and marginalized (represented by "these stones") have the potential to rise up and contribute to society, just as God was able to raise children for Abraham from seemingly unlikely sources. It implies a belief in the inherent worth and capacity of all people, regardless of their background or circumstances, to make significant contributions and fulfill their purpose in life.

"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight, and he must find his way from the beginning."

This quote by W.E.B. Du Bois illustrates the unique experiences and perspectives of African Americans in American society, often burdened with a historical legacy of slavery and racism. The "veil" refers to the social and racial barriers that have obscured their full integration into society. The "second-sight" symbolizes an insightful understanding that arises from navigating these challenges. Du Bois suggests that African Americans must forge their own paths, starting afresh in the face of adversity, while leveraging their unique perspective as a means to overcome barriers and contribute meaningfully to society.

"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."

This quote by W.E.B. Du Bois emphasizes the importance of education as a key factor in shaping the future. By preparing ourselves today through education, we equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive tomorrow. It underscores that those who invest in their own learning and development will be the ones reaping the benefits in the future, ultimately determining the course of society and their personal lives. Education, therefore, serves as a passport to the future, granting access to opportunities and empowerment.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Work, More, Manly, Striving

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

True, False, Ideal, Worthy

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Love, Enjoy, Been, Utter

School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Study, Mortar, Trained, Cultivated

Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Before, Workman, Wider, Efficient

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Very, Distinction, Laughed, Indeed

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Gift, Through, Brothers, Brown

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Love, Beauty, Color, Kingdom

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Life, Education, True Life, Broad

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Streets, Atmosphere, Wider, Broad

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Color, Line, Africa, Lighter

What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Possibilities, Discover, Stranger

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Through, Other, Roman, Egyptian

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Nation, Forming, Half, Anomaly

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Fact, Ashamed, Sold, Nasty

Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Been, Had, Fought, Subsistence

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Strength, Death, Armies, Wicked

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Play, Minds, Untrained, Fires

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

World, Meant, Centuries, Illustration

For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Best, Some, Trusting, Aspirations

The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Effort, Some, Direct, Theoretically

From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership?

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Been, Very, Internal, Elevated

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Color, Problem, Century, Twentieth

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Give, Need, Social, Selfishness

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Achieve, Leading, Classes, Proletariat

It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Beginning, Administration, Asserted

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Through, Always, Measuring, Peculiar

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Soul, Unpleasant, Upper, Upper Hand

If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Anybody, Shall, Thoroughly, Inherit

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

New, England, Army, Colonial

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Nation, Before, Raw Material, Colonial

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Will, Always, Human Beings, Broader

For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Younger, Fifteen, Half, Manhood

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Capitalism, Reform, Itself, Doomed

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Forward, More, Surging, Affairs

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Him, South, Johnson, Andrew

All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have, for the talented few, centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living as to have no aims higher than their bellies and no God greater than Gold.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

College, Nation, Some, Bellies

In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Breadth, South, Lincoln, None

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Hardships, Race, Very, Poor Man

The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Code, Perfectly, South, Denied

It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Will, Ultimate, African, Scholars

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Rights, South, North, Restricted

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Political, Right, More, Common-Sense

But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Through, Other, Sincerely, Devilish

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Education, Deal, Other, First Of All

The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Hands, Turned, Cent, Loose

Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours?

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Strong, Die, Away, Yours

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Lawyers, Nothing, Need, Furnish

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Fact, Will, Read, Meanings

Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Downward, Civilized, Tenth, Rises

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Training, Black, Teaching, Earnest

A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Education, Training, Whole, Object

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Freedom, Most, Does, Conceive

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Beauty, Reason, Fathers, Selves

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Deliberately, Oppressive, Starvation

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Thought, Race, Tenth, Talented

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Some, Take, Read, Hand

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Wealthy, Been, Proportion, Self-Defense

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.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Thoughts, Torn, Ideals, Keeps

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.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Strength, Feels, Torn, Keeps

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Work, Education, Teach, Simply

In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Amendment, United States, Referred

I am a Bolshevik.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

I Am, Am, Bolshevik

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Need, Defense, Ballot, Sheer

There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Average, Some, Dozens, Slavery

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Work, Education, People, Uplift

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Women, Argument, Every, Suffrage

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Education, Within, Which, Walls

I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Happy, Childhood, Acceptance

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Liberty, Price, Cost, Less

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Book, Classic, Again, Written

I was born free.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Free, Born, I Was Born

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Real, How, Hard, Lowly

Education is the development of power and ideal.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Education, Development, Ideal

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Race, Negroes, Lazy

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