aapt midterm

“The remark is not unfrequently made, that slaves are the

most contented and happy laborers in the world. They dance

and sing, and make all manner of joyful noises—so they do;

but it is a great mistake to suppose them happy because they

sing. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows, rather than

the joys, of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an

aching heart is relieved by its tears. Such is the constitution of

the human mind, that, when pressed to extremes, it often

avails itself of the most opposite methods…Sorrow and

desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace. Slaves

sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their

happiness”

frederick douglass

“Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men

and women to be either slaves or slaveholders”

frederick douglass

“We were both victims to the same

overshadowing evil—she, as mistress, I, as slave”

frederick douglass

“The morality of free society can have no

application to slave society….Make a man a

slave and you rob him of moral responsibility.

Freedom of choice is the essence of all

accountability”

frederick douglass

“My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had

many children, but NO FAMILY!”

frederick douglass

“The slave-mother can be spared long enough from the

field to endure all the bitterness of a mother’s anguish,

when it adds another name to a master’s ledger, but

not long enough to receive the joyous reward afforded

by the intelligent smiles of her child”

frederick douglass

“Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey—undignified

as it was, and as I fear my narration of it is—was the turning

point in my “life as a slave.” It rekindled in my breast the

smouldering embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore

dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a

changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A

MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my

self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed

determination to be A FREEMAN. A man, without force, is

without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so

constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it

can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of

power do not arise”

frederick douglass

“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless

one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and,

as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason”

frederick douglass

“The slaveholder, kind or cruel, is a slaveholder still—the every

hour violator of the just and inalienable rights of man; and he

is, therefore, every hour silently whetting the knife of

vengeance for his own throat. He never lisps a syllable in

commendation of the fathers of this republic, nor denounces

any attempted oppression of himself, without inviting the

knife to his own throat, and asserting the rights of rebellion

for his own slaves”

frederick douglass

“The morality of free society can have no

application to slave society….Slaveholders I

hold to be individually and collectively

responsible for all the evils which grow of the

horrid relation, and I believe they will be so

held at the judgment, in the sight of a just

God. Make a man a slave and you rob him of

moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the

essence of all accountability”

frederick douglass

“The thought of being a creature of the present

and the past troubled me, and I longed to have a

future—a future with hope in it”

frederick douglass

“Patrick Henry, to a listening senate, thrilled by his

magic eloquence, and ready to stand by him in his

boldest flights, could say, ‘GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME

DEATH,’ and this saying was a sublime one, even for a

freeman; but, incomparably more sublime, is the same

sentiment, when practically asserted by men

accustomed to the lash and chain—men whose

sensibilities must have become more or less deadened

by their bondage. With us it was a doubtful liberty, at

best, that we sought; and a certain, lingering death in

the rice swamps and sugar fields, if we failed”

frederick douglass

”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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

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.

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

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.

web du bois

“The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the

heavy heritage of this generation”

web du bois

“Cast down your buckets where you are.”

booker t washington

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as

much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not

at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances

to overshadow our opportunities”

booker t washington

“In all things that are purely social we can be as

separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all

things essential to mutual progress”

booker t washington

“Honest and earnest criticism from those whose

interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of

writers by readers, of governments by those

governed, of leaders by those led,--this is the soul

of democracy and the safeguard of modern

society”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“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?”

web du bois

“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!”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“The gospel of Work and Money”

web du bois

”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?”

web du bois

”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”

web du bois

“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”

web du bois

“The price of culture is a Lie”

web du bois

“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?”

web du bois

“Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims

landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts

and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft

stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land;

the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness,

conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast

economic empire two hundred years earlier than your

weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the

Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for

thrice three hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we

have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that

was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice have

billowed over this people, and they have found peace only

in the altars of the God of Right”

web du bois

“Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very

warp and woof of this nation,--we fought their

battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with

theirs, and generation after generation have

pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to

despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the

nation be stricken with a curse. Our song, our toil,

our cheer, and warning have been given to the

nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts

worth the giving? Is not this work and striving?

Would America have been America without her Negro people?”

web du bois

“a hope not hopeless but

unhopeful”

web du bois

“I asked, ‘Where is the black man’s Government?’

‘Where is his King and his kingdom?’ ‘Where is his

President, his country, and his ambassador, his

army, his navy, his men of big affairs?’ I could not

find them, and then I declared, ‘I will help to make

them’”

marcus garvey

“We…demand Africa for the Africans at home

and abroad”

marcus garvey

“The world has reached the crossroads of

humanity, where each race will travel in its

own direction, when each group will travel in

its own avenue”

marcus garvey

“At no time in the history of the world, for the last five hundred

years was there ever a serious attempt made to free Negroes. We

have been camouflaged into believing we were made free by

Abraham Lincoln. That we were made free by Victoria of England,

but up to now we are still slaves, we are industrial slaves, we are

social slaves, we are political slaves, and the new Negro desires a

freedom that has no boundary, no limit. We desire a freedom that

will lift us to the common standard of all men…; therefore, in our

desire to lift ourselves to that standard we shall stop at nothing

until there is a free and redeemed Africa”

marcus garvey

“But against all accusations which may or can be

be preferred against me, I appeal to Heaven for

my motive in writing—who knows that my object

is, if possible, to awaken in the breasts of my

afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a

spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our

miseries and wretchedness in this Republican

Land of Liberty!!!!!!”

david walker

“Every body who has read history, knows, that as soon as a slave among the Romans

obtained his freedom, he could rise to the greatest eminence in the State, and there was no

law instituted to hinder a slave from buying his freedom. Have not the Americans instituted

laws to hinder us from obtaining our freedom? Do any deny this charge? Read the laws of

Virginia, North Carolina, &c. Further: have not the Americans instituted laws to prohibit a man

of colour from obtaining and holding any office whatever, under the government of the United

States of America? Now, Mr. Jefferson tells us, that our condition is not so hard, as the slaves

were under the Romans!!!!!!”

david walker

“But let us review Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us some further.

Comparing our miserable fathers, with the learned philosophers of

Greece, he says: "Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging

circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest

artists. They excelled too, in science, insomuch as to be usually employed

as tutors to their master's children; Epictetus, Terence and Phaedrus,

were slaves,—but they were of the race of whites. It is not their

condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction." See

this, my brethren!! Do you believe that this assertion is swallowed by

millions of the whites? Do you know that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great

characters as ever lived among the whites? See his writings for the world,

and public labours for the United States of America. Do you believe that

the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by

this people and the world? “

david walker

“Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to

the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and our

minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great

learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should

speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what to

compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage,

where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the

same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as

fast as the one at liberty.”

david walker

“Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or natural right, from under our cruel

oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear”

david walker

“It is not to be understood here, that I mean for us to wait until God shall take us by the

hair of our heads and drag us out of abject wretchedness and slavery, nor do I mean to

convey the idea for us to wait until our enemies shall make preparations, and call us to

seize those preparations, take it away from them, and put every thing before us to death,

in order to gain our freedom which God has given us. For you must remember that we

are men as well as they. God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet,

and some sense in our heads as well as they. They have no more right to hold us in

slavery than we have to hold them, we have just as much right, in the sight of God, to

hold them and their children in slavery and wretchedness, as they have to hold us, and

no more”

david walker

“This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of

virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor blind

Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves

to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a

contribution to truth, an array of facts, the

perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this

great American Republic that justice be done

though the heavens fall”

ida b wells

“They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a

man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to

lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the

cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us as

a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on

hoping and believing that general education and

financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are

devoting their energies to the accumulation of both.”

ida b wells

“The mob spirit has grown with the increasing

intelligence of the Afro-Americans”

ida b wells

“Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white

man in the Negro’s body were lost. The white man had no

right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a

right to kill him. But the Southern white people had been

educated so long in that school of practice, in which might

makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of action

in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept

subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of

the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of

intimidation came into vogue the Negro was not only whipped

and scourged; he was killed”

ida b wells

“They do not see that by their tacit

encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of

lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over

the whole country”

ida b wells

“They forget that a concession of the

right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the

right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the

cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us as a race of

rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and

believing that general education and financial strength would

solve the difficulty…”

ida b wells

“Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white

man in the Negro’s body were lost. The white man had no

right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a

right to kill him. But the Southern white people had been

educated so long in that school of practice, in which might

makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of action

in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept

subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of

the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of

intimidation came into vogue the Negro was not only whipped

and scourged; he was killed”

ida b wells

“A man, without force, is without the essential

dignity of humanity.”

frederick douglass

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as

much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of

life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our

grievances to overshadow our opportunities”

booker t washington

“No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is

long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges

of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared

for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in

a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to

spend a dollar in an opera house”

booker t washington

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the

old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white

women”

ida b wells

“The men and women of the South who disapprove

of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of

such outrages are particeps criminis, accomplices,

accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty

with the actual law-breakers who would not persist if

they did not know that neither the law nor militia

would be employed against them”

ida b wells

“To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the

South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn

capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the

backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and

judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities

could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The

white man’s dollar is his god and to stop this will be to

stop outrages in many localities”

ida b wells

“The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever

been more effectual than all the appeals ever

made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely

nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of

manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of

his power as the industrial factor of the South,

the Afro-American can demand and secure his

rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial

for accused rapists”

ida b wells

“True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads

the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes

in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern

white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the

women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which

circumstances placed in his power…Virtue knows no color line,

and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and

texture of hair can command no honest respect”

ida b wells

“It is hoped that when the time comes for American and West Indian Negroes to settle in Africa, they will realize their responsibility and their duty. It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of establishing an overlordship over the natives, but it shall be the purpose of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to have established in Africa the brotherly co-operation which will make the interest of the African native and the American and West Indies Negro one and the same, that is to say, we shall enter into a common partnership to build up Africa in the interest of our race”

marcus garvey

“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!”

du bois - souls of white folk

“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?”

du bois - souls of white folk

“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”

du bois - souls of white folk

“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”

du bois - souls of white folk

“The civilization of today is gone drunk and crazy with its power and by such it seeks through injustice, fraud and lies to crush the unfortunate”

marcus garvey