And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-get...
The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passi...
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gai...
The Paz was an armed slaver flying the American flag.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men, and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening tha...
Rich and bitter depth of their experience, the
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,-who who in the swift whifl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvelous vision, have fronted life and aked its riddle face to face. And if you find that...
We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no tru...
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—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, w...
The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.
From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.
We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make...
Whirl of work. Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed a...
No approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and admin...
All in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.
VIII. TRANSUBSTANTIATION OF A POOR WHITEHow Andrew Johnson, unexpectedly raised to the Presidency, was suddenly set between a democracy which included poor whites and black men, and an autocracy that...
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no...
The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?
The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignatio...
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden...