W.E.B. Du Bois: “Consequently, there developed steadily, irresistibly, a vast social problem, which required two centuries and a half for…”

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

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

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.