W.E.B. Du Bois: “Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed,—the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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.

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.