W.E.B. du Bois: Returning Soldiers (1919)
WEB du Bois (1868-1963) was the first African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
1 We are returning from
war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were
drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and
has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German
race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and
her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern
oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For
the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste,
brutality and devilish insult—for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of
things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.
2 But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.
4 And lynching is
barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human
history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we
have kept this up right through the war.
5 It disfranchises its
own citizens.
6 Disfranchisement is the
deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and
black against white. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself
a democracy lies and knows it lies.
7 It encourages ignorance.
8 It has never really
tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated.
It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a
reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk
into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible
hypocrisy: “They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated.”
9 It steals from
us.
10 It organizes
industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of
our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It raises our
rent. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us
consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our
poverty.
11 It insults us.
12 It has organized a
nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous
insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It decrees that it
shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor
instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of
his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to
question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and
treason.
13 This is the country
to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we
fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of
our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again.
But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war
is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a
sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own
land.
14 We return.
15 We return
from fighting.
16 We return
fighting.
17 Make way for
Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save
it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
Source: W.E.B. DuBois,
“Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919), p. 13.
