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What do I mean? I mean this, that while Booker T. Washington seeks to promote the material advancement of the black man in the United States, and W.E. Burghart Du Bois his social enfranchisement amid surroundings and in an atmosphere uncongenial to racial development, Edward Wilmot Blyden has sought for more than a quarter of a century to reveal everywhere the African unto himself; to fix his attention upon original ideas and conceptions as to his place in the economy of the world; to point out to him his work as a race among the races of men; lastly and most important of all, to lead back unto self-respect. He has been the voice of one crying in the wilderness all these years, calling upon all thinking Africans to go back to the rock from whence they were hewn by the common Father of the nations-- to drop a metaphor, to learn to unlearn all that foreign sophistry has encrusted upon the intelligence of the African"
— EDWARD WILMOT BLYDEN