W.E.B. Du Bois: “The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.”

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

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of…