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. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
ATTRIBUTION:
W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois (1868–1963), U.S. civil rights leader, author. The Souls of Black Folk, ch. 2 (1903).
Du Bois discussed the problem of “the color-line” on a number of occasions, incorporating the concept in a speech at the first Pan-African Conference, January 1900, in London.
