W.E.B. Du Bois: “Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking?”

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

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.

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

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