Down through the green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I have seen a man--an educated gentleman--grow livid with anger because a little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car.
Du Bois illustrates the irrational anger directed at Black individuals in public spaces, emphasizing racial prejudice.
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The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…