W.E.B. Du Bois: “If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry,--a small and human cry…”

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

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.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.