In honor of Black History Month, I'm going to share a story that I read many years ago. I do not recall exactly where and when, but I will never forget the story itself.

The story takes place in a bookstore sometime during the early part of the 20th Century. A young black man was lovingly fingering a copy of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres –- Henry Adams’ learned and eloquent study of art and life in France during the Middle Ages. It was a beautiful book; but alas, the young man could not afford to buy it.

He was about to turn away with a sigh when he noticed that there was someone standing behind him. It was W.E.B. Du Bois, the famed author, intellectual and civil rights leader. Du Bois was the first African-American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In a magnificent gesture, Dr. Du Bois offered to buy the book for the young man on one condition –- that he would promise to read it.

Du Bois was a radical in the civil rights movement of his day –- a fiery genius. In 1903, he wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” But he saw nothing wrong with a young black man improving his mind by reading a book about European civilization. He did not warn the young man against dead white males and the evils of a Euro-centric curriculum. He did not tell him that striving for academic excellence was “acting white.” He did not launch into a chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” –- as Jesse Jackson did while parading through the campus of Stanford University back in the late 1980s.

No, he did none of these things. He bought the book for the young man on the condition that he would read it.

Du Bois could admire Henry Adams’ erudition and graceful prose style as warmly and enthusiastically as I can –- and do –- admire Du Bois himself as a writer. How could any writer not admire a man who could craft so felicitous a paragraph as this one, from The Souls of Black Folk:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

“So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.” There’s a lesson here, I think, for Americans of all races. In the end, we are all members of the same race –- the human race. In the end, what matters is not the color of our skin, but the depth of our understanding, the breadth of our sympathy, the strength of our moral convictions and the dedication with which we cultivate our talents.