W.E.B. Du Bois: “Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord.”

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

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.