The value in variety

A founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois knew the cure for racism wasn't simply telling the truth. It was inducing people to act on it. The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, Du Bois dreamed broadly of a world of "valuable variety ... in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip.... Each effort to stop this freedom of being,” he argued, “is a blow at democracy—that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity.... There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty.” Let us act on this truth.