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W. E. B. Du Bois is a Black sociologist, university professor, and civil rights activist. Born into a free Black community in the American North during the years of Reconstruction, Du Bois received his secondary education first at Fisk, a Black college, and then Harvard University. He is a founding member of the NAACP where he edits the organization’s magazine, The Crisis. Thus, he is a colleague of James Weldon Johnson and Walter White. Du Bois and The Crisis spearhead a national anti-lynching campaign, publicizing the details of lynchings throughout the country during the early 20th century. Du Bois hopes that Black Americans will achieve equality and civil rights through integration into white society, and he sees this integration led by the achievements of the “talented tenth,” the most accomplished and gifted Black men and women in a generation. This ideology animates Ossian Sweet’s drive to succeed as a doctor and amass personal wealth. Throughout his trial and his subsequent celebrity, Ossian not only understands himself as a member of this Black elite, but Du Bois directly names him as an example in The Crisis’s coverage of the trials.
W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes in Arc of Justice
The Arc of Justice quotes below are all either spoken by W. E. B. Du Bois or refer to W. E. B. Du Bois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
It took him twelve more years to fulfill his parents’ instructions, a dozen long, hard years of schooling to master the material that would make him an educated man and earn the pride that was expected of the race’s best men, all the while working as a serving boy for white people […] Ossian never excelled, but he got an education, as fine an education as almost any man in America, colored or white, could claim. By age twenty-five, he had earned his bachelor of science degree […] and his medical degree from Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, the jewel in the crown of Negro colleges.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
While Du Bois pledged that Negroes would return from Europe ready to fight for equal rights, socialists A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen preached the power of armed resistance. “We are…urging Negroes and other oppressed groups confronted with lynching and mob violence to act upon the recognized and accepted law of self-defense,” the pair wrote during the bloody summer of 1919. “Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made between the sacrifice of your life and the loss of the lyncher’s life, chose to preserve your own and to destroy that of the lynching mob.”
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W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes in Arc of Justice
The Arc of Justice quotes below are all either spoken by W. E. B. Du Bois or refer to W. E. B. Du Bois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
It took him twelve more years to fulfill his parents’ instructions, a dozen long, hard years of schooling to master the material that would make him an educated man and earn the pride that was expected of the race’s best men, all the while working as a serving boy for white people […] Ossian never excelled, but he got an education, as fine an education as almost any man in America, colored or white, could claim. By age twenty-five, he had earned his bachelor of science degree […] and his medical degree from Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, the jewel in the crown of Negro colleges.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
While Du Bois pledged that Negroes would return from Europe ready to fight for equal rights, socialists A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen preached the power of armed resistance. “We are…urging Negroes and other oppressed groups confronted with lynching and mob violence to act upon the recognized and accepted law of self-defense,” the pair wrote during the bloody summer of 1919. “Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice has to be made between the sacrifice of your life and the loss of the lyncher’s life, chose to preserve your own and to destroy that of the lynching mob.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
