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.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the…”
Editor's note · Context
Reflecting on the historical contributions of Black individuals, Du Bois laments how their brilliance often goes unacknowledged or is cut short.
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Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…
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.