W.E.B. Du Bois: “I saw life through all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment.”

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.

So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?