W.E.B. Du Bois: “I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this…”

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.

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.

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

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.