W. E. B. Du Bois

“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

“A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.”

“From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership?”

“The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.”

“It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section.”

“I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.”

“In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.”

“How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!”

“Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.”

“North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

“Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.”

“Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.”

“Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.”

“I am a Bolshevik.”

“My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

“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.”

“What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

“There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men.”