W.E.B. Du Bois: “Or shall it be a new thing,--a new peace and a new democracy of all races,--a great humanity of equal men?”

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

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

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…