W.E.B. Du Bois: “A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent…”

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…

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

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.

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.