W.E.B. Du Bois: “All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds.”

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?

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

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.

But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.