Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way…”
Editor's note · Context
Describing the physical landscape of the South, this passage highlights the beauty of nature juxtaposed with the harsh reality of forced labor and racial injustice.
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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.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.