W.E.B. Du Bois: “So vividly has this truth been brought home to us that we have lightly assumed that a privileged and enfranchised…”

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

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.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.