The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people.
Du Bois reflects on the internal struggle of Black artists who feel disconnected from both their heritage and their audience.
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By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
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.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.