The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his…”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois contrasts the widespread neglect of Black children with the love and wisdom he provided for his own son.
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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.
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.
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.