W.E.B. Du Bois: “Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing.”

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

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

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…