W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland.
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1963, Educator & Author, Co-Founder of the NAACP, Occasional Papers, No. 2, The American Negro Academy
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The population was an amalgam of Spaniards, Englishmen and other Europeans, Blacks originally brought over as slaves from Africa, and indigenous people from many different tribes.
At the time he was probably sincere as the whites—especially the farmers—had a great deal of know-how and provided a backbone for the economy. However, as he lost popularity, in order to hang on to power, he established a dictatorship and 20 years later pitted the Blacks against the whites destroying the economy and the country in the process. See related quote.
I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?
A Boston newspaper referred to Kennedy as "an Irishman." Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was an ugly, anti-Irish dimension to the national scene that was every bit as ugly as the other ethnic hatreds like anti-Semitism. The Irish like the early Jews had six strikes against them. They were foreigners. They were not Christian Protestants, they were poor, they did not know the American culture, they spoke English with a distinct accent, and they were the lowest of the lower classes. Even rich Irish like Kennedy were looked down upon and when his son ran for President he had to overcome a still significant block of anti-Irish Americans.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
He was agreeing with the Right Wing racist Dutch politician Geert Wilders that one of the dangers of immigration of different races and ethnicities is that their children would not be capable or able to contribute to America or in his view make America Great Again as it has been diminished by all these immiogrant babies of the last few generations. There are very few areas of civilization where America is not greater today than ever before.
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.
