But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new religious ideal.
This passage describes the profound, silent religious yearning within the Black community, seeking a new spiritual ideal after losing traditional guidance.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
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.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.