W.E.B. Du Bois: “I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by—” and we passed on.”

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…

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

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

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.