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.
From his seminal work, this passage reflects on the enduring presence of racial injustice in American society decades after emancipation.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.