W.E.B. Du Bois: “Help us, O Human God, in this Thy Truce, To make Humanity divine!”

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.