W.E.B. Du Bois: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”

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…

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

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

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.