W.E.B. Du Bois: “And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near…”

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.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.