W.E.B. Du Bois: “They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in…”

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.