W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.
Du Bois, W. E. B. "Ireland." The Crisis, vol. 20, no. 3, July 1920, p. 117.
William Z. Foster, the 1928 communist presidential candidate, was arrested because his party’s leaflet contained this “inflammatory” slogan.
He was criticizing the other major Black leader of the time, Booker T. Washington. See {625803} for the kind of position that angered Du Bois.
Before the civil rights act was passed, most labor unions will racist and discriminated against black workers. The United Auto Workers union was an exception and Reuther was a strong advocate of desegregation and equal rights.
The reason this quotation is important, it was the first time in American history that a President had tied racial discrimination to morality. Before that other Presidents had argued against segregation on pragmatic grounds or on legal, Constitutional grounds. Kennedy’s private moral declaration had a huge impact on Black leaders throughout the country who heard about it by word of mouth. That statement forged a bond between JFK and Blacks while most whites did not see anything striking in the statement.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University (in Berlin, Germany) and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
