We are all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the ways and bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the great mass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for every human height of attainment.
Du Bois reflects on the paradox of human connection, where people yearn for companionship yet often exclude others.
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The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
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.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.