W.E.B. Du Bois: “She saw the burning passion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upper air.”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.