W. E. B. Du Bois

“ The experience of the world's civilization teaches that the final and net result of slavery is bad—bad for the enslaved, and perhaps worse for the enslaver. If permitted a choice, I think I should prefer being the first to being the last. But in the case of the Negro in America no one, willing to be frank and fair, can fail to see that the Negro did get certain benefits out of slavery; at the same time he was, as I have stated, harmed. But in this connection we must deal with the facts and not with prejudice, either for or against the race. ”

“ If the South had been a place of intelligent farmers on small farms, we could imagine a development which would have been the wonder of the world; but because the fathers of the United States were so busy with large questions that they forgot larger ones, so busy settling matters of commerce and representation and politics that they forgot matters of work and justice and human rights—because of this we have in the South one of those curious back eddies of human progress that twist and puzzle advance and thought. ”

“ Is the race problem solved? Is the Negro out of politics in the South? Has there been a [111] single southern campaign in the last twenty years in which the Negro has not figured as the prime issue? Have the southern representatives in Congress any settled convictions or policy save hatred of black men, and can they discuss any other matter? Is it not the irony of fate that in the state that first discovered the legal fraud of disfranchisement a hot political battle is to-day waging on the old, old question: the right of black men to vote? ”

“ There of course could be strong argument that the nation owes the Negro something better than harsh industrial competition just after slavery, but the Negro does not ask the payment of debts that are dead. He is perfectly willing to come into competition with immigrants from any part of the world, to welcome them as human beings and as fellows in the struggle for life, to struggle with them and for them and for a greater South and a better nation. ”

“ But it is the duty of men, it is a duty of the church, to face the problem. Not only is it their duty to face it—they must face it, it is impossible not to, the very attempt to ignore it is assuming an attitude. It is a problem not simply of political expediency, of economic success, but a problem above all of religious and social life; and it carries with it not simply a demand for its own solution, but beneath it lies the whole question of the real intent of our civilization: Is the civilization of the United States Christian? ”

“ Why did the importers of Negro slaves go to the trouble and expense of going thousands of miles for a dark-skinned people to hew wood and draw water for the whites, when they had right among them a people of another race who could have answered the purpose? The answer is that the Indian was tried and found wanting in the commercial qualities which the Negro seemed to possess. The Indian, as a race, would not submit to slavery and in those instances where he was tried, as a slave, his labor was not profitable and he was found unable to stand the physical strain of slavery. ”

“ The present condition of the Negro in America is better than the history of slavery proves we might reasonably expect. With the help of his friends, North and South, and despite the bitter opposition of his foes, South and North, he has bought twelve million acres of land, swept away two-thirds of his illiteracy, organized his church, and found leadership and articulate voice. Yet despite this the South, Christian and unchristian, with only here and there an exception, still stands like a rock wall and says: Negroes are not men and must not be treated as men. ”

“ No, not that they fear Negro crime less, but that they fear Negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.
Are a people pushed to such moral extremities, the ones whose level-headed, unbiased statements of fact concerning the Negro can be relied upon? Do they really know the Negro? Can the nation expect [181] of them the poise and patience necessary for the settling of a great social problem? ”

“ I emphasize economic growth because the civilization of the world teaches that the possession of a certain amount of material wealth indicates the ability of a race to exercise self-control, to plan to-day for to-morrow, to do without to-day in order that it may possess to-morrow. In other words, a race, like an individual, becomes highly civilized and useful in proportion as it learns to use the good things of this earth, not as an end, but as a means toward promoting its own moral and religious growth [74] and the prosperity and happiness of the world. This is what I advocate for my race ”

“ May I add that, out of my own observation and experience in the heart of the South during the last twenty-five years, I have learned that the man of my race who has some regular occupation, who owns his farm, is a taxpayer and perhaps has a little money in the bank, is the most reliable and helpful man in the Sunday-school, in the church, and in all religious endeavor. The man who has gotten upon his feet in these directions is almost never charged with crime, but is the one who has the respect and the confidence of both races in his community. ”

“ In my own town of Tuskeegee there is a colored merchant who, not excepting any other merchant, has the largest trade in that county in retail groceries, and in a recent conversation with him he said that for thirty-five years his customers had been among the best white families of the county. More than a dozen times have I met the man who owned this Negro in the days of slavery and he expressed himself as more than pleased that his former slave had attained the honor of being the most successful grocery dealer in the town of Tuskeegee. ”

“ I would not care to live in a period when there was no weak part of the human family to be helped up and no wrongs to be righted. It is only through struggle and the surmounting of difficulties that races, like individuals, are made strong, powerful, and useful.
This is the road the Negro should travel; this is the road, in my opinion, the Negro will travel. I sometimes fear that in our great anxiety to push forward we lay too much stress upon our former condition. ”

“ One could not in justice ask them voluntarily to accept free black labor; the only possible way to insure the solving of that economic problem with labor really free was to put in the South a political power which should make slavery in fact or inference forever impossible. This truth the great Thaddeus Stephens saw, and with a statesmanship far greater than Lincoln's he forced Negro suffrage on the South. ”

“ How is the caste system of the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically [114] restricting his development; it is restricting his education so that the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and accomplishment ”

“ Disfranchise the Negro, said the South, and the race problem is solved; there is no race problem save the menace of an ignorant and venal vote;—relieve us from this and the lion and the lamb will lie down together;—the Negro will go peacefully and contentedly to work and the whites will wax just and rich. ”

“ The average white man of America, in passing judgment upon the black race, very often overlooks the fact that geographically and physically the semi-barbarous Negro race has been thrown right down in the centre of the highest civilization that the world knows anything about. Consciously or unconsciously, you compare the Negro's progress with your progress, forgetting, when you are doing it, that you are placing a pretty severe test on the members of my race. ”

“ The only status that they could possibly occupy was the status of slaves. They could not get along as freemen; they could not work as freemen; it was utterly unthinkable that people should live with them free. This was the philosophy that was worked out gradually, with exceptions here and there, and that was thought through, written on, preached from the pulpits and taught in the homes, until people in the South believed it as they believed the rising and the setting of the sun. ”

“ The men who, starting poor after a miserable war, went into the development of the South, went in to make money—to use the great American thesis, they were "not in business for their health." They were going to grant to the laborer just as little as they must; the laborer was unused to a system of free labor, he was not a steady workman, he was not a skilled workman, he had been for two or three hundred years driven to his work, he took no pride in his [92] work—how could he take pride in that which hitherto had been the badge of his shame? ”

“ Has not the time come for characterizing war plainly and ceasing to envelope it in a haze of sentimental lies? We have near worshiped the Civil War for a generation, when in truth it was a disgrace to civilization and we know it. ”

“ No sooner was it proclaimed from the house-tops than the rift in the lute appeared. "We do not want educated farmers," cried the landlords, "we want docile laborers." "We do not want educated Negro artisans," cried the white artisans, and they enforced their demands by their votes and by mob violence. "We do not want to raise the [113] Negro; we want to put him in his place and keep him there," cried the dominant forces of the South. Then those northerners who had lightly embraced the fair sounding program of limited labor training and disfranchisement found themselves grasping the air. ”

“ I am bound to conclude from what I see all about me, and what I know of the race elsewhere, that the Negro, notwithstanding the late start he has made in civilization and enlightenment, is capable of making himself a useful member in the communities in which he lives and moves, and that he is become more and more desirous of conforming to all the laws that have been enacted for the protection of society. ”

“ When in the seventeenth century there grew up in the New World a system of human slavery, it was not by any means a new thing. There were slaves and slavery in Europe, not, to be sure, to a great extent, but none the less real. The Christian religion, however, had come to regard it as wrong and unjust that those who partook of the privileges and hopes and aspirations of that religion should oppress each other to the extent of actual enslavement. The idea of human brotherhood in the seventeenth century was of a brotherhood of co-religionists. ”

“ It requires no argument to impress the fact that the most practical missionary work would have been in the direction of teaching these people how to cultivate the soil in the best manner with the very best implements, how to get the wealth out of their forests and water and mines, how to build roads, decent bridges and decent houses; in a word, how to take hold of the material riches with which Providence has blessed the land and turn these riches into moral and religious growth. ”

“ It will not be denied that Vesey's plan contemplated the total annihilation of the white population of Charleston. Nursing for many dark years the bitter wrongs of himself and race had filled him without doubt with a mad spirit of revenge and had given to him a decided predilection for shedding the blood of his oppressors. But if he intended to kill them to satisfy a desire for vengeance he intended to do so also on broader ground. The conspirators, he argued, had no choice in the matter, but were compelled to adopt a policy of extermination by the necessity of their position. ”

“ When you have the leading classes of a country with the ideal of slavery in their minds and the laboring classes ignorant and without political power, there is but one system that can ensue and that is serfdom, and through serfdom was the second way in which the South strove to meet its great post-bellum economic problem. ”

“ In the evening when he lays aside the working dress, takes matters easy, and gets his cigar and perhaps champagne, the Negro comes into contact with him, not to an advantage, but at his weakest point rather than at his strongest.
In the South, as in most parts of America, during slavery and after, the Negro has gotten something from the white man that has made him more valuable as a citizen. In most cases he imitates the best rather than the worst. For example, you never see a Negro braiding his hair in the same way as a Chinaman braids his, but he cuts his like the white man. ”

“ I consider labor one of the greatest boons which our Creator has conferred upon human beings.
Further, after making careful investigation, I am prepared to say that there is not a single man or woman who holds a diploma from the Tuskeegee Institute who can be found within the walls of any penitentiary in the United States.
I have learned that not more than a score of the graduates of the fifteen oldest and largest colleges and industrial schools in the entire South have been sent to prison since these institutions were established. ”

“ It may be that the price of the black man's survival in America and in the modern world, will be a long and shameful night of subjection to caste and segregation. If so, he will pay it, doggedly, silently, unfalteringly, for the sake of human liberty and the souls of his children's children. ”

“ The Bible was, in most cases, the only argument. In the conversion of the heathen to Christianity or in raising the standard of moral and Christian living for any people, I argue that in the use of the economic element and the teaching of the industries we should be guided by the same rules that are now used in the most advanced methods of ordinary school-teaching—that is, to begin with the known and gradually advance to the unknown; we should advance from the concrete to the abstract. In doing this, industrial education, it seems to me, furnishes a tremendously good opportunity. ”