We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.
Interpretation
True leadership and understanding must arise from within the oppressed community, rather than being imposed by outsiders.
W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes that the leadership needed for the black community in America cannot come from white individuals, no matter how sympathetic they may be. It stresses the importance of self-leadership within the black community, asserting that authentic guidance and social progress must originate from those who experience the same struggles and challenges.
In practice
During a speech about social justice, one might quote Du Bois to highlight the importance of self-empowerment.
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.'
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 energy you create around you is perhaps going to be the most important attribute - in the long run, EQ trumps IQ. Without being a source of energy for others, very little can be accomplished.
I'll take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty.
Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common _x000D_ _x000D_ to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
Wise guidance never violates people's Free Will. A superior who demands obedience of his subordinates should show respect for their capacity to understand, and also for their Innate Right to their own Free Will.
The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.
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