W.E.B. Du Bois: “This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it doggedly.”

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.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

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

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.