W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Boiswas an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth23 February 1868
CountryUnited States of America
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.
All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.
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. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assume to be criminal, violent, malignant.
I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
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.
It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.