Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.
This prophetic statement envisions a future awakening when the collective strength of Black people will irresistibly pursue freedom and justice, currently denied to them by racial segregation.
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.