W.E.B. Du Bois: “With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of a class of free Negroes came a change.”

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.