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Overview
The Wisdom Library invites you on a journey through the lives and works of the world’s greatest thinkers and leaders. Compiled by scholars, this series presents excerpts from the most important and revealing writings of the most remarkable minds of all time.
THE WISDOM OF W.E.B. DU BOIS
“Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote of W.E.B. Du Bois, “History cannot ignore [him] because history has to reflect truth, and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people.” Du Bois was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard (1896). A brilliant writer and speaker, he was the outstanding African-American intellectual of his time. His lifelong active struggle for racial equality and civil rights resulted in the founding of both the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, Du Bois presented the literary genius of many of the Harlem Renaissance’s most compelling voices; and his own works—the sociological study The Philadelphia Negro and his famous 1903 treatise, The Souls of Black Folk—eloquently delineated the African-American struggle for identity in America. During his lifetime, Du Bois was a powerful force in academia, literature, civil rights, and the peace movement. Using excerpts from his many books as well as from articles, essays, poems, letters, and speeches, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois provides a telling portrait of the man and his groundbreaking ideas. It is a tribute to a voice that would not be silenced and to a pioneer who, in his passion for justice movingly declared, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806540221 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kensington |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 100 |
| File size: | 963 KB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Civilization and Human Nature
Surpassing the notion of an historical concept or social theory, civilization represented for W.E.B. Du Bois an obtainable spiritual ideal. Key to that ideal in the early twentieth century was the ability and willingness of men and women from different races and cultural backgrounds to recognize the opportunity that history had placed before them through a confluence of unique events, trends, and circumstances. Modern democracy in the United States, spurred on by revolutions in Europe and Cuba and Africa, afforded Americans an opportunity to construct a society unprecedented in its potential to provide common citizens the advantages of freedom, prosperity, and privilege enjoyed only by the elite in most civilizations. Moreover, rapid advances in communication and transportation were making the world smaller and smaller every day, so that whatever benefited the United States might well benefit the rest of the world.
However, the ultimate test of this new opportunity was not how efficiently businessmen capitalized on financial contingencies or how cleverly politicians managed to garner power and influence. Nor was it even the safeguarding of citizens' rights on behalf of the common woman and man. The ultimate test came with the desire of those who would govern a civilization and those who would inhabit one to abandon all pretense to social superiority and bow in loving service before one another.
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.
The ultimate test on the way to establishing an ideal civilization encouraging ideal human behavior was to look bravely beyond gender, color, ethnic origin, religious difference, and class distinctions to discover and honor the value of each unique individual. The possibility was a universal one, capable of operating within any governmental setting or system. Obviously, democracy or any other form of government as a shared spiritual vision was something that would not be easily achieved. The question became a matter of each individual's willingness to recognize the possibility and embrace the challenge. Moreover, the endeavor could not stop with the efforts of a single nation. True civilization would never register as true civilization until it became, regardless of political or religious division, the motivating standard of all people in all nations.
It remains a big vision — some would certainly say laughable — for the world to entertain. It is the kind of goal that deprives humanity of any choice between "the Dream of the Spirit or the Pain of the Bone" and forces all to confront both.
* * *
In the civilized world each serves all, and all serve each, and the binding force is faith and skill, and the skill is bounded only by human possibility and genius, and the faith is faithful even to the untrue.
The battle for humanity is not lost or losing.
Which is really Truth — Fact or Fancy? the Dream of the Spirit or the Pain of the Bone?
The most hopeless of deaths is the death of Faith.
All this life and love and strife and failure — is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked — who is good? Not that men are ignorant — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
Thicken the thunder of God's voice, and lo! a world awakes!
Human unity within and without Nations, must and will succeed.
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.
Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.
Men have forgotten where civilization started.
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real.
Civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating life and the need and duty of power and intelligence.
Feeling like dying isn't going to help things a bit.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few of its pilgrims back to the world.
It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.
The matter of our logic is not nearly so important as that of our ethics and religion.
Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth.
To increase abiding satisfaction for the mass of our people, someone must sacrifice something of his own happiness. This is duty only to those who recognize it as a duty.
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream.
"Wed with truth" ... dwell above the veil.
Inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings.
The scars and foibles and contradictions of the Great do not diminish but enhance the worth and meaning of their upward struggle; it was the bloody sweat that proved the human Christ divine; it was his true history and antecedents that proved Abraham Lincoln a Prince of Men.
Let us follow the clear light and afterward turn to other darknesses.
With clean hands and honest hearts we must front high heaven and beg peace in our time.
From the use of insult grows the arrogant, overbearing nation which so often blindly misses the way of truth; from the bigotry of persecution grows the dead rot of mental death, and from war and murder come national as well as individual death.
Every man owes a certain respect to his own soul.
The roots of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life.
Still this widening of the idea of common Humanity is of slow growth and to-day but dimly realized.
There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong.
The oblivion of complete surrender or of complete silence. The object of life is to avoid either of these.
How can love of humanity appeal as a motive to nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman?
The greatest satisfaction comes from the sacrifice of to-day's enjoyment that tomorrow's may be greater.
Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.
One has a terrible plunge to make into some lurking pool of life.
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.
A pious belief outweighs an impious unbelief.
World philanthropy, like national philanthropy, must come as uplift and prevention and not merely as alleviation and religious conversion.
We strive for this broader vision of peace and good will.
A new standard of national efficiency is coming. And that efficiency is marked by the way in which a great modern advanced nation can be neighborly to the rest of the world.
Let the world take no backward step in that slow but sure progress which has successively refused to let the spirit of class, of caste, of privilege, or of birth, debar from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a striving human soul.
The place of those who would ride the conflagration is truly within and not behind or in front of the Holocaust.
Back of it all, back of the flesh, the mold, the dust, there must be Reality.
Woe to the man, who, with the revelation of the world once before him, as it stands before you now, has let it fade and whiten into common day — life is death.
Without infinite life, life is a joke and a contradiction.
Humanity is progressing toward an ideal; but not, please God, solely by help of men who sit in cloistered ease, hesitate from action and seek sweetness and light; rather we progress to-day, as in the past, by the soul-torn strength of those who can never sit still and silent while the disinherited and the damned clog our gutters and gasp their lives out on our front porches.
A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
Whenever a community seats itself helplessly before a dangerous public desire, or an ingrained prejudice, recognizing clearly its evil, but saying, "we must cater to it simply because it exists," it is final; change is impossible. Beware; the epitaph of that people is being written.
When you have chosen, stand by it, for the man who ever is wavering and choosing again is wasting God's time.
It is not the things which people have that makes the major part of civilization — the real civilization; real culture depends on quality and not quantity.
When in other days the world lied, it was to a world that expected lies and consciously defended them; when the world lies today it is to a world that pretends to be true.
What human reform demands today is light, more light; clear thought, accurate knowledge, careful distinctions.
It is the highest optimism to bring forward the dark side of any human picture.
Evolution is evolving the millenium, but one of the un-escapable factors in evolution are the men who hate wickedness and oppression with perfect hatred, who will not equivocate, will not excuse, and will be heard.
Being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
We deliberately and continuously deceive not simply others, but ourselves as to the truth about them, us, and the world.
We still yield the well-born the advantages of birth, we still see that each nation has its dangerous flock of fools and rascals; but we also find most men have brains to be cultivated and souls to be saved.
The insistent problem of human happiness is still with us.
Only the soul that suffers knows its suffering. Only the one who needs knows what need means.
Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.
His revolt was against things unsuitable, ill adjusted, and in bad taste; the illogical lack of fundamental harmony; the unnecessary dirt and waste — the ugliness of it all — that revolted him.
We can afford the Truth.
It is certain that all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural law, and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest, which is against the constitutions of the world, is vain.
Religious ideals have always far outrun their very human devotees.
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
Who shall restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep?
Doubtless, and in the long run, the greatest human development is going to take place under experiences of widest human contact.
Everybody is in favor of justice so long as it costs them no effort.
The alternative of not dying like hogs is not that of dying or killing like snarling dogs. It is rather, conquering the world by thought and brain and plan; by expression and organized cultural ideals.
Pessimism is cowardice.
To lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
Not by guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free and strong.
Deception is the natural defense of the weak against the strong.
It is an awful thing to have to be ashamed of one's self.
What shall the end be? The world-old and fearful things — war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a new thing — a new peace and a new democracy of all races — a great humanity of equal men?
CHAPTER 2Women
To Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois was a devoted son. To Nina Gormand, and after her death, to Shirley Graham, he was a loving husband. To Nina Yolande (as well as to Burghardt Gomer, his son who died in infancy) he was a proud and doting father. As a son, husband, and father, Du Bois engaged a perspective on women not endorsed by the majority of men of his era. He was a feminist who lobbied for the social, political, and sexual equality of women. Like that of his contemporary, Ida B. Wells Barnett, his political agenda placed the urgency of securing civil rights for African Americans a notch above that of obtaining the same for women in general, but he never let it drift far from the sphere of his concerns.
The issue for Du Bois was as much a matter of political and social practicality as it was one of sacred duty. As the son of a nomadic father, Alfred Du Bois, who left his family when Du Bois was still a toddler, he was very much aware of the limitations placed upon the lives of women by their forced dependence on men. The painful irony was that in cases like that of his mother, women were often forced to accept the responsibilities refused by men but were left without the social or economic means to meet those responsibilities. American women, like so many others around the world, were trained largely to live as second-class citizens, and living as a second-class citizen meant living as a victim. It was only by empowering them with full social and economic equality that average mothers, wives, and daughters of the world stood a chance of providing for themselves and the offspring they bore.
Most extreme among the abuses of women were those suffered by black women during American slavery. Against their will, they served in turn as instruments of sexual pleasure for their white masters and as breeding mares for the institution of slavery. Added to the shock of the routine violation of their bodies was the trauma of having to relinquish their children to unknown slaveholders. Du Bois considered this physical, mental, and spiritual abuse of black women — with its inevitable result being the destruction of the traditional African family — the highest crime committed by slave-holders and the one thing for which he said he could not forgive them. In his universe, the image of the black mother was that of a sacred being whose innate enchantment had been polluted and diluted by the ignorance, greed, and lust of white men. She now "sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost palm trees and scented waters." Many of his writings were offered as atonement for the ignored tears of mothers, wives, and daughters.
* * *
All religion, from beauty to beast, lies on her eager breasts; her body bears the stars, while her shoulders are necklaced by the dragon.
No state can be strong which excludes from its expressed wisdom, the knowledge possessed by mothers, wives and daughters.
There was a day in the world when it was considered that by marriage a woman lost all her individuality as a human soul and simply became a machine for making men. We have outgrown that idea.
God send us a world with woman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed.
In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with studied silence.
We cannot abolish the new economic freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require them all on pain of death to be muses and housekeepers.
The uplift of women is next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause.
Not being expected to be merely ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning their bodies only for play. Their sturdier minds have concluded that if a woman be clean, healthy, and educated, she is as pleasing as God wills and far more useful than most of her sisters.
The church is woman.
Your mother is Kali, the Black one; wife of Siva, Mother of the World.
It is inconceivable that any person looking upon the accomplishments of women today in every field of endeavor, realizing their humiliating handicap and the astonishing prejudices which they face and yet seeing despite this that in government, in the professions, in sciences, art and literature and the industries they are leading and dominating forces and growing in power as their emancipation grows — it is inconceivable that any fair-minded person could for a moment talk about a "weaker" sex.
My mother and I were good chums. I liked her.
It is the mother I ever recall, — the little far off mother of my grandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost palm trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, with beaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black and laughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all, my own mother, with all her soft brownness.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wisdom of the W.E.B. Du Bois"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Aberjhani.
Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
One: Civilization and Human Nature,
Two: Women,
Three: Love, Art, and Culture,
Four: Freedom and Democracy,
Five: African Americans,
Six: Education and Work,
Seven: War and Revolution,
Eight: Whiteness and Race Relations,
Nine: Slavery, Lynching, and the Civil War,
Ten: Africa,
Eleven: History and the World,
Twelve: Poetry, Prayers, and Parables,
Bibliography,
About the Editor,