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CLAIMING HUMAN DIGNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2010

Lawrence D. Bobo
Lawrence D. Bobo
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
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Extract

In the concluding line of his opening note to Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (1934[2007], p. xliii). Doing so was an intellectually courageous step at the time Du Bois wrote. Jim Crow strictures, after all, were almost fully institutionalized across the South by that time and larger cultural motifs stressing redemption and reconciliation were steadily undoing the meager steps toward uplift and equality for African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Enormous progress notwithstanding, we know that great challenges of enduring inequality and persistent cultural racism remain in our time. The spirit of this declaration and the a priori intellectual posture it embraces have, quite fittingly then, animated this journal from our inception.

Type
Editorial Introduction
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Fall 2010 , pp. 253 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2010

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References

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