W.E.B. Du Bois: “Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.”

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

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

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

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…