Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it more maddening.
This passage articulates the profound bitterness felt by those who keenly perceive the world's opportunities but are separated by the Veil of racial division, a bitterness intensified by its inherent justice.
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Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin…
But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.
Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.