Du Bois, The Problem of the Color-Line

Du Bois Description

Prominent rival of Washington regarding Black education and political strategy. Advocated for higher education and full civil rights over racial accommodation that Washington believed in for industrial progress.

Du Bois Quotes

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader, for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois is trying to introduce the modern problem of the color-line to his readers.

Du Bois Quotes

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois’s describes the Negro Problem where Black Americans have to go through contradictions to achieve true freedom.

Du Bois Quotes

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 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

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois describes the feeling of double-consciousness where African Americans must fight segregation in the real world and also mentally.

Du Bois Quotes

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the old selves to be lost. He 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 an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois discusses the merge of the double-consciousness of gaining true equality while preserving distinct cultural heritage.

Du Bois Quotes

What, then, is race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois is defining that race is more than sharing DNA, but the sharing of culture and memories.

Du Bois Quotes

But one thing is sure and that is the fact that since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory

Significance: The significance of this quote is that the devastating history of African Americans have stayed consistent for a very long time.

Du Bois Quotes

Between me and the other world is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois senses an unasked question behind white people’s performative empathy and microaggressions that Black people pretend is real with a pretend smile.

Du Bois Quotes

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; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,--What shall be done with the Negroes? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day.

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois elevates the segregation from Black and white people in America to a broader world-wide view.

Du Bois Quotes

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines

Significance: The significance of this quote is that freedom of slaves was not on the agenda during the Civil War, but Black Americans actively transformed this war into a fight for human freedom.

Du Bois Quotes

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

Significance: The significance of this quote is that the impossible of Black people becoming Freedmen is finally happening.

Du Bois Quotes

The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois characterizes the Freedmen’s Bureau as the negative unresolved failures due to the abandonment of Reconstruction.

Du Bois Quotes

But the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment

Significance: The significance of this quote is that the dream of becoming free is a disappointment when actually gaining freedom.

Du Bois Quotes

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,--this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society

Significance: The significance of this quote is that there should accountability for the government from the people, both colored and non-colored.

Du Bois Quotes

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground

Significance: This discusses the talented tenth and how if they are exceptionally educated, they should help the entire group progress in society.

Du Bois Quotes

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

Significance: The significance of this quote is that intellectual liberation is a way to get above the veil and gain true freedom.

Du Bois Quotes

Free! The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,--the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,--not even ownership of the rags on his back. Free!

Significance: The significance of this quote is that the title of being free isn’t truly experiencing freedom, it’s just an empty title without the true legal capacity.

Du Bois Quotes

The Negro farmer started behind,--started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy- go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge

Significance: The significance of this quote is that after Black people gained emancipation, they were still not truly equal to their white counterparts due to debt peonage and sharecropping causing a cycle of poverty. Additionally, white people are now switching their focus to pursuing imperial expansion abroad.

Du Bois Quotes

The gospel of Work and Money

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Du Bois thinks if people prioritize work and money, Black people will never progress and continue being used as commodity to help the white people’s society.

Du Bois Quotes

What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions?

Significance: Du Bois warns Black people to not be swayed towards materialism and greed as they are risking long-term benefits of higher education.

Du Bois Quotes

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty

Significance: This quote is significant because it shows Du Bois’s belief in receiving higher education to progress in society over brief monetary progress.

Du Bois Quotes

The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise. Sleep, then, child,--sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil

Significance: The significance of this quote is that his baby was spared a lifetime of living behind “the Veil“ of racism, the child was able to escape racial prejudice and is now above the Veil.

Du Bois Quotes

The price of culture is a Lie

Significance: The significance of this quote is that to gain access to society, Black people are often forced to conform to societal norms and it’s not worth it.

Du Bois Quotes

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into black—the triumph of the Lie which to-day, with its false culture, faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin

Significance: The significance of this quote is that Black people are faced with two dangerous extremes when in the presence of white supremacy. One is anarchy where Black people give up and destroy everything while the other is hypocrisy where Black people give up and conform to societal norm.

Du Bois Quotes

We darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture-back of all culture,­ stripped and visible today. This is where the world has ar­rived,-these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone

Significance: The significance of this quote is Du Bois calling out Western civilization for their personal greed of expansion and imperialism and that World War One was inevitable and not a freak accident.

Du Bois Quotes

A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations

Significance: The significance of this quote is that white people do not represent all of humanity and the majority of humanity is actually made of colored people from Africa and Asia.

Du Bois Quotes

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious!

Significance: The significance of this quote is Du Bois’s vision of white folks is through a perspective of a connection they share language, not just a foreign or servant/master relationship, but something deeper.

Du Bois Quotes

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atro­cities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders?

Significance: The significance of this quote is that it shows America’s hypocrisy by of serving as the world’s savior while actively participating in systematic racial violence against Black citizens in America.

Du Bois Concepts

Double Consciousness: the psychological inner conflict experienced by Black individuals in a white-dominated society. Feeling an internal division between being American and black.

Du Bois Concepts

The Color-Line: The division between white and non-white people, rooted in colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.

Du Bois Concepts

The Veil: The physical, psychological, and social barrier dividing Black and white worlds.

Du Bois Concepts

Talented Tenth: The top 10% of educated Black Americans are responsible to help the greater Black population progress in society through intellect, culture, and organizing.

Du Bois Concepts

• Restricted mobility

  • laws used to sustain racial inequality by restricting Black movement and labor freedom

• Debt peonage

  • a new form of slavery where Black farmers would rent land from white landowners in exchange for share of crops but would accumulate debt, legally tying them to the land and preventing generational wealth from forming.

• Segregation

  • Legal separation between white and Black people

• Unequal standing in courts

  • white people were rarely convicted compared to Black people

• Disenfranchisement

  • systematic legal striping of Black people’s rights leaving the Black community defenseless against lawmakers.