Life & Wisdom Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois opens with a pivot that’s also a rebuke: “But what of black women?” The line reads like an interruption of the record, a refusal to let the conversation about “the Negro,” citizenship, labor, or uplift default to men. It’s a pointed editorial move, yanking the reader’s gaze toward a group routinely treated as supporting cast even in sympathetic accounts of Black progress.

Then comes the risky brilliance of his praise. “Fineness” is not accidental; it’s a Victorian-coded word that signals moral poise, cultural refinement, inner discipline. Du Bois is speaking in a language his era’s gatekeepers recognize, but he’s weaponizing it against the era’s assumptions. The subtext: the society that claims Black women are unfit for full personhood has been forced to witness their strength under conditions designed to break them.

“Devilish a fire” does double duty. It evokes the literal violence of slavery and Jim Crow and the daily burn of sexual exploitation, economic precarity, and social contempt. Calling it “devilish” shifts blame outward: this isn’t romanticized suffering that builds character; it’s manufactured cruelty with an author. Du Bois’s intent is less to sentimentalize resilience than to indict the furnace that demanded it.

There’s also a tension worth noticing: admiration can flatten into idealization. Elevating Black women as uniquely capable of enduring risks making endurance the expectation. Still, in its moment, the sentence functions as corrective and confrontation: if any “fineness” is visible, it is evidence against white supremacy, and against the comfortable erasures inside reform movements themselves.