W.E.B. Du Bois: “It was my first introduction to a Negro world, and I was at once marvelously inspired and deeply depressed.”

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

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.

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

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