They would prepare themselves with apprehension, indeed, but without dismay--with regret, but with firmness--for one of those desperate struggles which have sometimes occurred in the history of the world.
Du Bois speaks to the resilience required in the face of potential struggles, drawing on historical precedents.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.
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.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.