“Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”
Source: The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States
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W.E.B. Du Bois 62
American sociologist, historian, activist and writer 1868–1963Related quotes

W.E.B. DuBois, Birth Control Review, June 1932. Quoted by Sanger in her proposal for the "Negro Project."
Misattributed

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)
Context: So that saying, "in the struggle between the negro and the crocodile," &c., is made up from the idea that down where the crocodile inhabits a white man can't labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile or negro; if the negro does not the crocodile must possess the earth; [Laughter; ] in that case he declares for the negro. The meaning of the whole is just this: As a white man is to a negro so is a negro to a crocodile; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile, so may the white man rightfully treat the negro. This very dear phrase coined by its author, and so dear that he deliberately repeats it in many speeches, has a tendency to still further brutalize the negro, and to bring public opinion to the point of utter indifference whether men so brutalized are enslaved or not.

The motive is not a desire to elevate the negro, but to humiliate and degrade those of mixed blood; not a desire to bring the negro up, but to cast the mulatto and the quadroon down by forcing him below an arbitrary and hated color line.
1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Variant: The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.
Source: 1900s, A History of the American People, Vol. 9 (1902), p. 58

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

Division and Reunion, 1829-1889 Longmans, Green, & Company (1893) p. 273
1890s

As quoted in "Trapped Inside James Baldwin" by Michael Anderson http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/reviews/980329.29anderst.html, a review of Baldwin's Collected Essays in The New York Times (29 March 1998)