The Souls of Black Folk Quotes

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”

“There was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.”

“The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing.”

“In all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay?”

“Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

“And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in vain. Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life. More critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had emphasized. The dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great shortcoming, and here he would begin.”

“It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evildoing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.”

“It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt.”

“The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.”

“The true college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

“The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense.”

“Only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understands, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”

“They whose lot is gravest must have the carefullest training to think aright.”

“For this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat.”

“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 like to be a problem?, they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town, or...”

“Oh,” thought I, “this is lucky”, but even then felt the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I---alone.”

“My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”