W.E.B. Du Bois: “Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded…”

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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

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