W.E.B. Du Bois: “Fortunately so exaggerated a charge is humanly impossible of truth.”

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.