Читать книгу The Gift of Black Folk & The Souls of Black Folk (New Edition) - W. E. B. Du Bois - Страница 17

How the black slave by his incessant struggle to be free has broadened the basis of democracy in America and in the world.

Help in exploration, labor unskilled and to some extent skilled, and fighting, have been the three gifts which so far we have considered as having been contributed by black folk to America. We now turn to a matter more indefinite and yet perhaps of greater importance.

Without the active participation of the Negro in the Civil War, the Union could not have been saved, nor slavery destroyed, in the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ Without the help of black soldiers, the independence of the United States could not have been gained in the eighteenth century. But the Negro’s contribution to America was at once more subtle and important than these things. Dramatically, the Negro is the central thread of American history. The whole story turns on him whether we think of the dark and flying slave ship in the sixteenth century, the expanding plantations of the seventeenth, the swelling commerce of the eighteenth, or the fight for freedom in the nineteenth. It was the black man that raised a vision of democracy in America such as neither Americans nor Europeans conceived in the eighteenth century, and such as they have not even accepted in the twentieth century; and yet a conception which every clear sighted man knows is true and inevitable.