Gift of Black Folk Quotes

“The Negro worked as farmhand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan, and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it would have been impossible.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk

“Nearly all of the mental efforts of the white South run through one narrow channel. The life of every southern white man and all of his activities are impassably limited by the ever present Negro problem. And that is why, as Mr. H. L. Mencken puts it, in all that vast region, with its thirty or forty million people and its territory as large as half a dozen Frances or Germanys, “there is not a single poet, not a serious historian, not a creditable composer, not a critic good or bad, not a dramatist dead or alive” [James Weldon Johnson].”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“First, of course, we may think of those more celebrated cases where the mixed blood is fairly well known, but nevertheless the man has worked and passed as a white man. One of the earliest”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“The same writer tells us that few white men marry, preferring to live with their slaves or with women of color. A generation later, the situation”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“could not be distinguished by the most intelligent strangers from the best class of white gentlemen either by color or manner, dress or language; still, as it was known by tradition and common fame that they were not of pure Caucasian descent, they could not vote.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“Thousands of colored men whose homes were in Louisiana served bravely in the national army and navy and many of the so-called Negroes in New Orleans”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“There were in the South in 1860, 3,838,765 Negro slaves and 258,346 free Negroes. The question of land and fugitive”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“The Negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“A long, awful process of selection chose out the listless, ignorant, sly and humble and sent to heaven the proud, the vengeful and the daring. The old African warrior spirit died away of violence and a broken heart.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”3”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“Patrick Henry said that slavery was “repugnant to the first impression of right and wrong” and George Washington hoped slavery might be abolished. Thomas Jefferson made the celebrated statement: “Indeed I tremble for my”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

“He was not easily brought to recognize any ethical sanctions in work as such but tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave when in truth he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk

“We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America. And that what Man has here begun with all its want and imperfection, with all its magnificent promise and grotesque failure will some day blossom in the souls of the Lowly.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: Historical Account of the Role of African Americans in the Making of the USA