W.E.B. Du Bois: “I am dead; Yet somehow, somewhere, In Time's weird contradiction, I May tell of that dread deed, wherewith I brought to…”

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

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…

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.