W.E.B. Du Bois: “If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and deed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and…”

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

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.