W.E.B. Du Bois: “On the strong and cunning few Cynic favors I will strew; I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies…”

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.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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

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