W.E.B. Du Bois: “Because the blind, brutal crime of powerful and selfish interests made this path through hell the only visible way to…”

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.

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.

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

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.