W E B Dubois Souls Of Black Folk Quotes

One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children's intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers' stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion. ~ Dana Goldstein

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?), ~ Howard Zinn

g*d wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age ... for there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism & a new enslavement of labor" --w.e.b. dubois ~ Debois

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,
this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost ... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American ... ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk. ~ Orson Scott Card

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

It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars! ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin
the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. ~ Naomi Murakawa

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

she said, when I wear these boots no one fucks with me
when I tie my past like a scarf around my throat
I can freeze the blood
of every naive and unabashed up-and-comer
when I slide on my desire like glowing black stockings
I can make the uninitiated beg
for the feel of raw and stinging wood
and when I slip my angry black leather belt
from its rusty hook
the ambitious and guileless cower
like a thousand condemned souls
when I close my fist, my rings golden
with a youth well spent
the warriors of Gilead surrender
with a breathless whimper
and when my shoulders
feel the rough comfort of my serape woven with the fibers
of a fierce and relentless vengeance
you will soon realize
these are not my clothes after all, she says,
they are warning signs ~ Daniel Ames

VI. LOOKING BACKWARD

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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 the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes; - and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, - aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned Niggers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children's children live today. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I am a shadow. I walk the wet roads under the dim light of the pale lamps, in the darkest hour of the cold dull nights.
I walk past the silent graveyard of the dead memories, towards the city of chaos plagued with gloom.
I do not exist, but in the eyes of the shattered souls. In the chapter of an old book. In the poem. In the smile of a wrecked and in the tear of a broken spirit.
Listen me in the songs told in the times long forgotten.
Search for me in the churchs and temples, bars and brothels,pitch black nights and the colorless days.
Dive down in your deepest part of your soul. And you will find my home.
I have many faces but I have no face of my own. I am a shadow. ~ Foaad Ahmad

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

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

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner ... and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid. ~ Aberjhani

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

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal"

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey,banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it. ~ Anya Krugovoy Silver

How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois