We have seen,--Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood,--what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent.
In this passage, Du Bois laments the cruelty inflicted upon Black Americans in the name of civilization and justice.
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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.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
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.