Meantime, my attitude toward the problems of peace and progress had slowly become revolutionized. Formerly I had assumed with most folk that the path of human progress lay necessarily through war, and that if the colored peoples of the world and those of America ever secured their rights as human beings, it would be through organized violence against their white oppressors. But after the First World War, I began to realize that under modern conditions such means to progress were self-defeating. With modern techniques in world war, there could be no victory. The victor was, in the end, as badly off as the vanquished. Reason, education, and scientific knowledge must replace war.

—W.E.B Du Bois, In Battle for Peace