On the recordJanuary 1, 1903
Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city.
Said by
W.E.B. Du Bois
Source
gutenberg.orgW.E.B. Du Bois: “Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city.”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois uses a powerful metaphor to describe Fisk University's Jubilee Hall, funded by the spirituals, as a beacon of Black achievement.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Jan 1, 1903
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…
Jan 1, 1903
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
Jan 1, 1903
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.
Jan 1, 1903
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.