Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of purple and gold:—Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for the world.
Contrasting with those who despair, this passage celebrates Atlanta's determined embrace of the future and its ambitious self-identity.
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So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
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.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.