W.E.B. Du Bois: “I held back with more difficulty each day my mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.”

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

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.