W.E.B. Du Bois: “Insane, wicked, and wasteful as the tyranny of the few over the many may be, it is not more dangerous than the tyranny…”

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

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.

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.