W.E.B. Du Bois: “We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are…”

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

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.