Posted on August 27, 2011
Today marks the 48th anniversary of the death of scholar-activist
W.E.B. Du Bois. He died at his home in Accra, Ghana at the age of 95
on the eve of the 1963 March On Washington. A pioneer in the Pan
African liberation movement, and an indefatigable foe of racism,
imperialism, and oppression, Du Bois always will be remembered for his
intellectual rigour and unwavering commitment to the struggle for
human rights worldwide.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote this about Du Bois: "history cannot
ignore W.E.B. DuBois 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. There were very few scholars who concerned themselves with
honest study of the black man and he sought to fill this immense void.
The degree to which he succeeded disclosed the great dimensions of the
man."
His biographer David Levering Lewis wrote, "In the course of his long,
turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible
solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship,
propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights,
cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism,
expatriation, third world solidarity."
Du Bois quotes:
"In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a
nigger."
"Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the
United States."
"Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more
than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro
honesty, knowledge, and efficiency. "
"…in any land, in any country under modern free competition, 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."
"What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few
hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand
millions in diamonds and cocoa?"
"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
two-ness,—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."
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line
— the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this
problem that caused the Civil War."
"But what of black women? . . . I most sincerely doubt if any other
race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a
fire."
"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach."
"The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any
moment to give up what you are for what you might become."
Obituary from the NYT: W. E. B. DuBois Dies in Ghana; Negro Leader and
Author, 95.
I took the following photos last month in Accra, Ghana:
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