Justice & Law Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

The sting here is that it reads like bootstrap scolding, but it lands as something thornier: Du Bois turning the language of respectability into a weapon, and then daring his audience to notice who that language is meant to impress. “Complaint and whining” is not a neutral description of protest; it’s the vocabulary of people who want grievance to sound childish. By invoking it, Du Bois stages a rhetorical trap: if you accept the premise that demands for justice are mere noise, you’ve already ceded moral ground to the very power structure that prefers Black politics quiet, grateful, and privately industrious.

The phrase “manly striving” is doing a lot of work. It’s gendered, yes, but also coded as legible citizenship: discipline, productivity, stoicism. Du Bois is signaling the era’s brutal rules of credibility, where Black claims had to be packaged as virtue to be heard at all. He’s not simply praising toil; he’s exposing how American respect is rationed through a narrow performance of masculinity and “dogged work.”

The kicker is the swipe at “a thousand civil rights bills.” Read straight, it sounds anti-legislative; read in context, it’s an indictment of paper justice and symbolic reforms that substitute for material power and collective self-possession. Du Bois wrote amid Reconstruction’s wreckage, Jim Crow’s consolidation, and a political culture fluent in lofty promises and allergic to enforcement. The subtext: rights on the books mean little without organized pressure, economic leverage, and the relentless, unromantic grind of building institutions that can’t be ignored.