Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois summarizes the profound and diverse contributions of Black Americans to the nation, emphasizing a bond of shared experience and sacrifice.
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Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this…
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If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.