W.E.B. Du Bois: “Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see at last some glimmering of dawn.”

The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for…

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

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.

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.