W.E.B. Du Bois: “Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.”

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.

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

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.

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.