So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world’s rough ways.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither the world nor…”
Editor's note · Context
In The Souls of Black Folk, this sentence captures a young Black boy's profound existential questioning and growing disillusionment with the world due to his experiences.
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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…
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
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