Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.
From his seminal work, this passage reflects on the enduring presence of racial injustice in American society decades after emancipation.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
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.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…