W.E.B. Du Bois: “Get yourselves and your sons and daughters out of the shadow of this awful thing!”

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…