Negroes had no bards, and therefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed the slave.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Negroes had no bards, and therefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed the slave.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois critiques the narrative that philanthropy was solely responsible for the emancipation of slaves, emphasizing the absence of African American voices.
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To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.