W.E.B. Du Bois: “The world lies beneath the waters now--may I go?”

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…

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

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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.