W.E.B. Du Bois: “The world lies beneath the waters now--may I go?”

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.