W.E.B. Du Bois: “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only…”

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.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

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…