W.E.B. Du Bois: Sage of the century

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 14 CRISIS JULY/AUGUST 1999 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 the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness-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 usunder. ( 903)

NEGRO AND AMERICAN

(The American Negro) would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and American, without being cursed and spit upon his fellows, without having the door of opportunity closed roughly in his face. ( 1903)

ON `PEOPLE OF COLOR':

"Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability be what colored men make it:,

"I tell you, people of America; the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy, and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical splitting of political hairs ... Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide, but the vast majority [of the world's peoples] will march on over them to freedom." (I915)

ON WOMEN:

"The meaning of the twentieth century is the freeing of the individual soul, the soul longest in slavery and still in the most indefensible slavery is the soul of womanhood:' (1915)

ON EUROCENTRISM

EUROCENTRISM:

"Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strengh and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal,world-wide work of meannesscolor." (1920)

ON CRIME:

"Murder may swagger, theft may rule and prostitution may flourish and the nation give but spasmodic, intermittent and lukewarm attention. But, let the murdered be Black or the thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood,and the righteousness of indignation sweeps the world. Nor would this fact make the indignation less justifiable did not we know that it was blackness that was condemned and not crime:' (1920)

ON SEPARATION AND INTEGRATION:

"There sould never be an oppostion to segregation pure and simple unless that segregation...involves discrimination, ...If the existence of [an all Black school] is made reason and cause for giving it worse housing, poorer facilities, poorer equipment and poorer teachers, then we do object, and objections is not against the color of the pupils' or teachers' skin, but against the discrimination:' (1934)

ON DEMOCRACY:

"Democracy is not merely a distribution of power among a vast number of individuals. It is not merely majority rule based on the fact that the majority has the physical force to prevail. It is something far more fundamental than this; It rest upon the fact, that when we have proven knowledge, interpreted through the experience of a large number of individuals, it is possible through this pooled knowledge and experience to come to decisions much more far-reaching than can be had in any other way...The people participating effectively in this pool of democracy must be alive and well, they must know the world which they are interpreting and they must know themselves." (I 947)

ON THE COLOR LINE:

"I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it; and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men has waged war until today. War tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race:' (1953)

ON HIMSELF:

"I am not worried about being inconsistent. What worries me is Truth:' (1934)

LAST MESSAGE OF DR.W.E.B. DU BOIS

It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last good-bye to one's loved ones and friends and to all the familiar things of this life.

I am gong to take a long, deep and endless sleep.This is not punishment but a privilege to which I have looked forward for years.

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been unlifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justity my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.