Stamped

by

Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

W. E. B. Du Bois Character Analysis

The fourth of the five main historical figures in Stamped, W. E. B. Du Bois was a prominent Black writer, sociologist, and activist. He was born in 1868 and died at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963. After attending Fisk University and getting his PhD at Harvard, Du Bois became a powerful intellectual leader for many Black Americans. He taught at Atlanta University, co-founded the NAACP, and published the influential book The Souls of Black Folk. He publicly opposed Booker T. Washington’s proposal that Black people should accept segregation and white rule in order to advance in American society. However, Du Bois still spent much of his career pushing assimilationist ideas. For instance, he believed in “uplift suasion”: he thought that Black people needed to educate themselves and economically develop in order to win equality in American society. He even thought that he was superior to other Black people because he was biracial. But over the course of his life, he met antiracists like the anthropologist Franz Boas and the poet Langston Hughes, who gradually brought him around to their side. By the end of his life, Du Bois gave up on uplift suasion, quit the NAACP, and started working with Black freedom activists to fight for racial equality.

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes in Stamped

The Stamped 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:
Racism vs. Antiracism Theme Icon
).
Chapter 15 Quotes

Du Bois believed in being like White people to eliminate threat so that Black people could compete. Washington believed in eliminating thoughts of competition so that White people wouldn’t be threatened by Black sustainability. And there were Black people who believed both men, because, though we’re critiquing their assimilationist ideas in this moment, they were thought leaders of their time.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington
Page Number: 122-123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

But not everyone was kissing Du Bois’s assimilationist feet. There was a resistant group of artists that emerged in 1926 who called themselves the Niggerati. They believed they should be able to make whatever they wanted to express themselves as whole humans without worrying about White acceptance. […] They wanted to function the same way as the blues women, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who sang about pain and sex and whatever else they wanted to. Even if the images of Blackness weren’t always positive. W. E. B. Du Bois and his supporters of uplift suasion and media suasion had a hard time accepting any narrative of Black people being less than perfect. Less than dignified. But the Niggerati were arguing that, if Black people couldn’t be shown as imperfect, they couldn’t be shown as human.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

It was 1933. Du Bois’s life as an assimilationist had finally started to vaporize. He just wanted Black people to be self-sufficient. To be Black. And for that to be enough. Here he argued that the American educational system was failing the country because it wouldn’t tell the truth about race in America, because it was too concerned with protecting and defending the White race. Ultimately, he was arguing what he’d been arguing in various different ways, and what Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, and many others before him had argued ad nauseam: that Black people were human.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

King closed the day with what’s probably the most iconic speech of all time—“I Have a Dream.” But there was bad news. W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleep the previous day.

Indeed, a younger Du Bois had called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade millions of White people to love the lowly souls of Black folk. And, yes, the older Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist path less traveled—toward forcing millions to accept the equal souls of Black folk. It was the path of civil disobedience that the young marchers […] had desired for the March on Washington, a path a young woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill was already traveling and would never leave.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr.
Page Number: 164-165
Explanation and Analysis:
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W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes in Stamped

The Stamped 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:
Racism vs. Antiracism Theme Icon
).
Chapter 15 Quotes

Du Bois believed in being like White people to eliminate threat so that Black people could compete. Washington believed in eliminating thoughts of competition so that White people wouldn’t be threatened by Black sustainability. And there were Black people who believed both men, because, though we’re critiquing their assimilationist ideas in this moment, they were thought leaders of their time.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington
Page Number: 122-123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

But not everyone was kissing Du Bois’s assimilationist feet. There was a resistant group of artists that emerged in 1926 who called themselves the Niggerati. They believed they should be able to make whatever they wanted to express themselves as whole humans without worrying about White acceptance. […] They wanted to function the same way as the blues women, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who sang about pain and sex and whatever else they wanted to. Even if the images of Blackness weren’t always positive. W. E. B. Du Bois and his supporters of uplift suasion and media suasion had a hard time accepting any narrative of Black people being less than perfect. Less than dignified. But the Niggerati were arguing that, if Black people couldn’t be shown as imperfect, they couldn’t be shown as human.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

It was 1933. Du Bois’s life as an assimilationist had finally started to vaporize. He just wanted Black people to be self-sufficient. To be Black. And for that to be enough. Here he argued that the American educational system was failing the country because it wouldn’t tell the truth about race in America, because it was too concerned with protecting and defending the White race. Ultimately, he was arguing what he’d been arguing in various different ways, and what Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, and many others before him had argued ad nauseam: that Black people were human.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

King closed the day with what’s probably the most iconic speech of all time—“I Have a Dream.” But there was bad news. W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleep the previous day.

Indeed, a younger Du Bois had called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade millions of White people to love the lowly souls of Black folk. And, yes, the older Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist path less traveled—toward forcing millions to accept the equal souls of Black folk. It was the path of civil disobedience that the young marchers […] had desired for the March on Washington, a path a young woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill was already traveling and would never leave.

Related Characters: Jason Reynolds (speaker), W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr.
Page Number: 164-165
Explanation and Analysis: