W.E.B. Du Bois: “They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart.”

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.