Sunday Reflection

"What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!" -- civil rights pioneer, writer and teacher Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868, was the author of the seminal collection of essays, "The Souls of Black Folk," and a founder of the NAACP, who earned the first PhD by an African American from Harvard. His Niagara Movement pushed for full civil rights for African Americans, contrasting with Booker T. Washington's incrementalist Atlanta Compromise approach, and paved the way for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In his later years, his politics drifted to the far left, embracing some tenets of Communism. His death on August 27, 1963 at 95 occurred the day before the historic March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.