A Contribution that No Other Race Can Make

A Contribution that No Other Race Can Make. W.E.B. Du Bois National Historic Site. , ”We believe that the Negro people as a race have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity that no other race can make.” , , W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 1897, Du Bois travelled widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa, becoming one of the twentieth century's best-known global figures. He viewed himself as the product of a mix of cultures, and believed that only true democracy and self-determination would allow each of the earth's peoples to contribute its unique gifts to the building of a better world for all. Du Bois especially loved people of African descent, whose gifts had been suppressed by enslavement and 500 years of economic exploitation. , He struggled mightily to liberate Africans from the tyranny of European colonialism, and mentored many of the first generation of post-colonial Africa's leaders. At the time of his death in 1963 he was living in Ghana, where President Kwame Nkrumah invited him to create the Encyclopedia Africana. You can visit Du Bois' grave on the grounds of the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture, the compound in Accra, Ghana where he lived and worked. , "I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development." , , W.E.B. Du Bois, Credo, 1904, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line , the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." , , W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, "I had again at Berlin as at Harvard unusual opportunity.... I began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Asia and Africa, and the political development of Europe as one." , , W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 1920, ”When shall I forget the night I first set foot on African soil , I, the sixth generation in descent from my stolen forefathers.” , , W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, April 1924