W.E.B. Du Bois: “In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions…”

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development.

Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.

I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.