Dubois Quotes

• The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.

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  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Men   Self   African American  

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.28, Oxford University Press

  2392

• Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

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  Tennessee Williams

  Unforgivable   Cruelty   Dubois  

  4224

• When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

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  Richard Yates

  Reading   Writing   Order  

  Richard Yates (2010). “Young Hearts Crying”, p.184, Random House

  1458

• It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.

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  Barack Obama

  Father   Son   Men  

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”, p.220, Broadway Books

  2532

• We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

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  Henry Louis Gates

  Thinking   Race   Class  

  4396

• [ Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher] introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.

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  Michael Eric Dyson

  Teacher   Taught Us   Important  

  3276

• There never has been a desire on the part of the government that the struggle of Black people in America should be linked to the struggle of our people in every part of the earth. Every leader that was international in scope and in reach became the target of the government - Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Kwame Ture and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Any Black leader who would try to connect us to our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia were seen as a threat and became a target.

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  Louis Farrakhan

  Brother   Kings   Struggle  

  Source: www.finalcall.com

  3985

• I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm X came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective.

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  Manning Marable

  Thinking   America   Years  

  Source: historynewsnetwork.org

  3740

• I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

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  Barack Obama

  Art   Men   Self  

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.86, Canongate Books

  2263

• I didn't have any close relationship with him because, although [William Edward Burghardt] DuBois may not have been as egocentric - I don't know - he certainly was not the easiest person to approach. I think, certainly, those of us who were younger sort of respected that in terms of his preoccupation with deep thoughts. So, I made no effort to establish any relationship with him. However, he was in and out then.

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  Ella Baker

  Thinking   Effort   Deep Thought  

  Source: www.crmvet.org

  4770