Talk:W. E. B. Du Bois

Relevance of WEB Dubois today

In THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK I input the COMING OF JOHN story, and had a little edit war. It loses meaning if cut into separate quotes. I just read SOULS OF BLACK FOLK and was amazed by this touching passage, written in 1903 but so relevant today.... Heart of WEB Dubois and American Class War:  Regardless of race, many workers yearn to do Great Work to give our lives PURPOSE, but oppressors would rather keep us as toilet cleaner slaves. John pays for his opera ticket, sublime beauty of LOHENGRIN inpsires him to do Great Work, and at that instant, usher kicks him out for being a Negro, despite the fact that he paid for his ticket. Denied beauty, back on street, ultimately John gets lynched at the end of this sad story. Very haunting.

WEB Dubois was the Malcolm X of his generation. Other wikiquotes amazingly relevant in 2007:


 * "The cause of war is preparation for war." ...That's the Bush neocon game.


 * "The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this—with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need—this life is hell." ...That's the whole point of THE COMING OF JOHN.  I suffer lousy meaningless McJobs and underemployment, like many in USA today.  Haunting and relevant quote for American workers in 2007.


 * "In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger." ...Sounds like Malcolm X.


 * "The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma." ...Such Atheism is especially relevant in USA today.  Atheism was a central tenet of his socialism.  Dare African Americans admit this truth today, that religion is for the uneduated, while Atheism is a natural result of higher education?  Dubois was far ahead of his time, and far ahead of USA today!

The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois suggested merge
The historic distinction of The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois and the fact that the title has a contemporary living co-author/editor makes it more suitable to stand as a separate entity rather than as one section merged into another. However, linking the pages by adding this page under "See Also" on the W.E.B. Du Bois page serves to extend and in a sense merge both, thereby successfully fulfilling the intent of the initial suggestion.


 * I disagree. When a biographer quotes his subject, the quotes belong in the article about his subject, i.e. W. E. B. Du Bois. When a biographer remarks about his subject, the remarks belong in a section for quotes about the subject or in an article about the biographer, i.e. Aberjhani. There should only be a separate article for the biography if those pages would otherwise be excessively long. (To speak of the historic distinction of a recent work is a bit of an oxymoron. History will decide later, much later.) ~ Ningauble 12:34, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I fully agree with Ningauble that there are no significant reasons not to merge quotes from this work into the W E B Du Bois page, where it could have its own section for quotes of Du Bois —  and perhaps some of them into a sectionn for others about him. This page can then be simply retained as a "redirect" page to that one. ~ Kalki (talk &middot; contributions) 12:49, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The book consists primarily of a collection of unsourced attributions, which makes merging difficult. Either someone needs to research the actual sources of the quotes, or else we just cite this collection as an attributor. The latter is a very marginal outcome, for compilations that do not cite sources are just about the lowest form of quotation collections, second only to, and difficult to distinguish from, the sort that contain made-up stuff. ~ Ningauble 14:15, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Merge these ~ They are practically the same and both hold the correct information that I would need or want to find when looking up "W. E. B. Dubois quotes" - Anonymous editor

Quotes about Du Bois

 * Completing the story of slavery meant acknowledging the many black abolitionists who advocated for the freedom of slaves. It further meant recognition of the thousands of African Americans who fought to free themselves during the Civil War as opposed to waiting for emancipation.
 * Aberjhani, in The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003), p. 96


 * Very possibly it was his hope that one day someone might have reason to say of him what he imagined at the end of his essay on Crummell that Christ must have said upon greeting the priest's weary spirit: "Well done!"
 * Aberjhani, in The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003), p. 130


 * Black Reconstruction is not the sort of book any scholar would want as the foundation of a new interpretive school. Du Bois was no historian. He consulted only limited sources and did no original archival research, an omission that “disturbed many scholars, several of whom dyspeptically noted the author’s generous foundation support,” according to his biographer David Levering Lewis. The germ of the project was a dispute Du Bois had with the editors of Encyclopedia Britannica in 1929. They commissioned an entry on black history from him, which he withdrew when they asked him to delete some excessively rosy passages on Reconstruction. Obviously the Britannica editors wanted a racially progressive spin on history, or they would not have gone to Du Bois. But there is a line between creative reinterpretation and outright fantasy, and in their professional opinion, Du Bois had crossed it.
 * Helen Andrews, Reconstruction Revisionism, The American Conservative, 11 December 2021


 * The version of Reconstruction history that Du Bois presents is based on motivated reasoning and tendentious distortions of the evidence. That is why it is so disturbing that this school is now the conventional wisdom. With no tools other than repetition and vehemence, these brazen innovators succeeded in getting their misrepresentations enthroned as orthodoxy and the commonsense histories of yesterday not just superseded but slandered as racist.
 * Helen Andrews, Reconstruction Revisionism, The American Conservative, 11 December 2021


 * It is no coincidence that the two most prominent Reconstruction revisionists, Du Bois and Eric Foner, are both Marxists. Du Bois died a Stalinist and appointed prominent communist historian Herbert Aptheker as his literary executor. Foner is a longtime Soviet sympathizer whose father and uncles were CPUSA members. In 1990, he encouraged Mikhail Gorbachev, faced with upstart secessionists in the Baltics, to imitate Abraham Lincoln’s example and preserve his union.
 * Helen Andrews, Reconstruction Revisionism, The American Conservative, 11 December 2021


 * In his essay, "The Damnation of Women," Du Bois combined the Socialist theory of Charlotte Perkins Gilman with his own analysis of the Black experience, and so projected a new theory that saw the potential emancipation of all women in the independence of Black women.
 * Bettina Aptheker Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982)


 * Ten years later, Margaret Sanger, pioneer advocate of birth control, wrote to Du Bois asking him to send a message to be read at the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, "to either encourage us to continue our work, or to express your frank opinion of what we should do and how to do it." Du Bois sent the following statement: "Next to the abolition of war in modern civilization comes the regulation of birth by reason and common sense instead of by chance and ignorance. The solution for both of these problems of human advance is so perfectly clear and easily accomplished that it is only kept back by the stupidity of mankind, the utter refusal of even educated persons to face the problem frankly. While this is, in the highest degree, discouraging, it is on the other hand encouraging to know that only "light, more light" is needed and here as elsewhere we have simply to keep everlastingly at it to bring ultimate triumph.
 * Bettina Aptheker Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982)


 * As editor, author, lecturer, scholar, organizer, inspirer, and fighter, Dr. Du Bois was among the most consequential figures of the century.
 * Herbert Aptheker blurb for Autobiography of W.E.B. Dubois (1968)


 * An immediate effect of the Civil War on LGBT lives and history was how it shaped ideas about gender; specifically, what it meant to "be a man." Historian Drew Faust notes that during the Civil War, manhood was "defined and achieved by killing." W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America: "How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!"
 * Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States (2011)


 * Miriam Jiménez Román and Flores write: "Afro-Latin@ is at the personal level a unique and distinctive experience and identity because of its range among and between Latin@, Black, and United States American dimensions of lived reality. In their quest for a full and appropriate sense of social identity Afro-Latin@s are thus typically pulled in three directions at once and share a complex, multidimensional optic on contemporary society." Taking a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois, we might name this three-pronged web of affiliations "triple-consciousness." To paraphrase those unforgettable lines from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in studying the historical and contemporary experience of United States Afro-Latin@, one ever feels his three-ness, -a Latin@, a Negro, an American; three souls, three thoughts, three unreconciled strivings; three warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. Du Bois's reference to strength and resilience bears emphasis: the multiple experiences and perspectives including the contradictions, pain, and outrage-does not necessarily translate into pathological confusion. As many of the contributions to this volume suggest, embracing and celebrating all the dimensions of one's self has not only been possible but has also resulted in significant innovations at the personal and collective level.
 * Melissa Castillo-Garsow, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (2018)


 * it has to do with Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness: you inherit a set of values at home, and have to embrace another set of values when you walk out of home. You are appreciated if you are more assertive at school. On the contrary, you are supposed to be obedient at home. It’s about balancing the two worlds. My poetry is about negotiating many worlds, the past and the present, as well as the East and the West. “Inner cultivation” and outer despair. The sublime and the ridiculous.
 * Marilyn Chin Interview with Asian Review of Books (2020)


 * "The United States is at war with Haiti," W. E. B. Dubois wrote after returning from a fact-finding mission to occupied Haiti. "Congress has never sanctioned the war. Josephus Daniels [President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the navy] has illegally and unjustly occupied a free foreign land and murdered its inhabitants by the thousands. He has deposed its officials and dispersed its legally elected representatives. He is carrying on a reign of terror, brow-beating, and cruelty, at the hands of southern white naval officers and Marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion."
 * Edwidge Danticat Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), also in her introduction to the English translation of Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet


 * every person in this country, from high school to the postgraduate level, should read W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. In the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. And I'm making this point because what happens when 2060 rolls around? Will people still be addressing these same issues?
 * Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2015)


 * We have been aware of the need for these institutional strategies at least since 1935 — but of course before, but I’m choosing 1935 because that was the year when W.E.B. Du Bois published his germinal Black Reconstruction in America. And the question was not what should individual Black people do, but rather how to reorganize and restructure post-slavery society in order to guarantee the incorporation of those who had been formerly enslaved. The society could not remain the same — or should not have remained the same. Neoliberalism resists change at the individual level. It asks the individual to adapt to conditions of capitalism, to conditions of racism.
 * Angela Davis, Interview with Democracy Now (2020)


 * Du Bois argues that it was the withdrawal and bestowal of labor by slaves that won the war. And what he calls "this of striking labor" eventually provided the two hundred thousand soldiers, "whose evident ability to fight decided the war." And these soldiers included women like Harriet Tubman, who was a soldier and a spy and had to fight for many years in order to be granted, later, on a soldier's pension.
 * Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2015)


 * W.E.B. Du Bois called such erasure [of the first arrival of enslaved Africans to America] the propaganda of history. "It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is 'lies agreed upon'; and to point out the danger in such misinformation," he wrote in his influential treatise Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois argued that America had falsified the fact of its history "because the nation was ashamed.”
 * Nikole Hannah-Jones, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019


 * a decidedly moving book
 * William James about The Souls of Black Folk, 6/6/1903 letter in The Letters of William James (2012)


 * As Cedric Robinson argued, a group of radical black intellectuals including W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox, and others, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western civilization itself...In The World and Africa (1947), Du Bois writes: "There was no Nazi atrocity-concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood-which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world."
 * Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams (2002)


 * Unfortunately, neither Du Bois nor Robeson nor anyone else with a continuing commitment to the Left had anything to say about Stalin's atrocities-the political assassinations, the gulags, the Soviet state's hidden war against political dissidents and Russian Jews. Although it is not clear who knew what before Khruschev unveiled these crimes to the world in 1956, the silence that followed these revelations is one of the great tragedies in the history of the Communist movement. The other great tragedy, for the black freedom movement in particular, was the silencing of radical leadership. Robeson, Du Bois, and Claudia Jones were among the many victims of statesponsored anticommunist witch hunts.
 * Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams (2002)


 * one could argue, as W. E. B. DuBois did in his book Black Reconstruction in America, that by running away from the plantations and permanently withholding their labor from their tormentors, escapees from the slave system were, in a way, striking.
 * Kim Kelly (journalist) Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor (2022)


 * A ninety-year-old Du Bois was hopeful, too, in another way. "Today, the United States is fighting world progress, progress which must be toward socialism and against colonialism," he said, speaking to seven hundred students and faculty at Howard University in April 1958. Later in the year, having gotten his passport back, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, where he happily met Chairman Mao Tse-tung. When Mao started musing about the "diseased psychology" of African Americans, showing that he was attuned to the latest racist social science, Du Bois interjected. Blacks were not diseased psychologically; they lacked incomes, Du Bois explained, inciting a debate and a fusillade of questions from Mao. When Du Bois expressed some of his failures as an activist, Mao interjected. Activists only failed when they stopped struggling. "This, I gather," Mao said, "you have never done."
 * Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), New York: Bold Type Books, p. 368


 * Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his earlier years at the turn of the century, urged the “talented tenth” to rise and pull behind it the mass of the race. His doctrine served somewhat to counteract the apparent resignation of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy. Yet, in the very nature of Du Bois’s outlook there was no role for the whole people. It was a tactic for an aristocratic elite who would themselves be benefited while leaving behind the “untalented” 90 percent.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (1963), p. 25


 * There is this... that must be admired about DuBois, Robeson, Ben Davis and others. They are not taking it lying down. Ben Davis is in prison... Robeson bas sacrificed... DuBois has fought without let up for over half a century and at 85 be is determined as ever. Some day when truth gets a hearing, America, regardless of colour, we will honour them.
 * J. A. Rogers, attributed in Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems


 * More than a century ago, Du Bois posited a profound incommensurability between Blackness and Americanness. This incommensurability was at the heart of his formulation of double-consciousness, the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (Du Bois 1903:5). For Du Bois, to be Black in America was to develop a felt "two-ness... two unreconciled strivings" (1903:5). The desired resolution for Du Bois was a different sort of doubleness, one that would "make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American... without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face" (1903:5). How could one be Black and "successful" in America? Du Bois' engagement with this question was a precursor to the NNHS-based concept of Young Latino Professional that emerged more than a century later. What Du Bois described as the "veil" that barred African Americans from the White American world can be productively understood in relation to Latinx subjectivities by drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization of exclusion in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). For Anzaldúa, borders are recursive structures that can be reproduced on a number of scales, such that the "color line" (in Du Bois' terms) is just one of many possible sites for the production of exclusion and double-consciousness. In her formulation of a New Mestiza Consciousness, the racial and economic exclusion caused by colonialism must always be understood in relation to the sexual and gender domination of patriarchy. Anzaldúa's Chicana feminism involves the experience of multiple forms of double-consciousness in response to the multiplicity of power. In some places, Anzaldúa characterizes her lesbian Chicana feminist consciousness as a "Shadow-Beast... that refuses to take orders from outside authorities... that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed" (1987:38)...What Du Bois' navigates as transcendence around and above the exclusionary veil, allowing him to access both the Black and White worlds, Anzaldúa approaches with a hopeful ambivalence: she is without country as a Mestiza, yet possesses all countries through the potential for feminine kinship: she is without race as a lesbian, yet identifies with all races as part of a queer diaspora; and she is without culture as a staunch critic of patriarchal beliefs and practices, yet fully cultural as a creative participant in the production of an emergent reality (1987:102-103).
 * Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019)


 * I had epiphanies about the fragility of American democracy reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America.
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)


 * It took another few decades of scholarship, and the civil rights movement, to shift the public perception of the era toward the truth. The few dissenting voices, like W.E.B. Du Bois, were ignored at the time and vindicated by historians only after decades of hindsight.
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)


 * "For a brief period for the seven mystic years that stretched between Johnson's 'Swing Around the Circle' to the Panic of 1873-the majority of thinking Americans of the North believed in the equal manhood of Negroes," W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935. "While after long years the American world recovered in most matters, it has never yet quite understood why it could ever have thought that black men were altogether human." These Americans believed black lives mattered. But only for a moment.
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)


 * Abolitionists urged defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act and lived by their words, running slave catchers out of town and breaking captured black people out of custody. Frederick Douglass said that the best way to make the act a "dead letter" was "to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers."
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)


 * In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the story the country tells about its relationship to chattel slavery is willfully distorted. "Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center... One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.'
 * Clint Smith (writer), How the Word is Passed (2021)


 * In 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois attacked the decision to erect Confederate monuments as ahistorical and irresponsible: "The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments-the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: "Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery." But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: "Died Fighting for Liberty!"
 * Clint Smith (writer), How the Word is Passed (2021)


 * W. E. B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers. Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was “absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order.” As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”
 * Thomas Sowell, Who Is “Fascist”? The abuse and proper use of a political label. National Review, February 13, 2008


 * Dr. Du Bois had written his The Souls of Black Folk the year following the fiasco of the Afro-American Council in Saint Paul. Although the country at large seemed to be accepting and adopting Mr. Washington's theories of industrial education, a large number agreed with Dr. Du Bois that it was impossible to limit the aspirations and endeavors of an entire race within the confines of the industrial education program.
 * Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1991)


 * The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.
 * The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

 * the problem of "the color line," as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us.


 * W. E. B. Du Bois, saw the late-nineteenth-century betrayal of the Negro as part of a larger happening in the United States, something happening not only to poor blacks but to poor whites. In his book Black Reconstruction, written in 1935, he said: “God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.” Du Bois saw this new capitalism as part of a process of exploitation and bribery taking place in all the "civilized" countries of the world: “Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands..”


 * In general, the Negro was kept out of the trade union movement. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1913: "The net result of all this has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his fellow white workingman."


 * The NAACP concentrated on legal action and education, but Du Bois represented in it that spirit which was embodied in the Niagara movement's declaration: "Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty."