Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Interpretation
This quote highlights the disparity in economic opportunities between African Americans and European immigrants before the Civil War.
W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes the unequal treatment of African Americans in the workforce before the Civil War, illustrating that while immigrants from Ireland and Germany had growing economic opportunities, the Black population faced systemic barriers entrenched in societal prejudice that aimed to restrict their progress and contributions.
In practice
During a discussion on workplace diversity, one might quote Du Bois to emphasize historical disparities.
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.
Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.
I began to understand that not only was there was a social justice agenda, there was a policy agenda. For every justice campaign there was a policy initiative associated with it.
Being a young black man, observing and sensing the need for race equality and women's rights, I wrote about what was important to me.
The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.
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