W.E.B. Du Bois: “To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of…”

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

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.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

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.