Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness.
This passage discusses the confusion and uncertainty faced by Black individuals in America shortly after Emancipation.
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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.
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.
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.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.