Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. The faults of our country are our faults. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.ġ3This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. 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. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.ġ2It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It cheats us out of our land it cheats us out of our labor. 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.”ġ0It organizes industry to cheat us. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.ĨIt has never really tried to educate the Negro. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.ĦDisfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.ĤAnd lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. 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.ĢBut 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. 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. DuBois urged returning soldiers to continue fighting for democracy at home.ġWe are returning from war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. W.E.B DuBois, “Returning Soldiers” (May, 1919)
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