He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to.
This passage from The Souls of Black Folk places Alexander Crummell's life within a turbulent historical period, reflecting on the challenges of the past and future.
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This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…