Sublime

saw a world of promise beyond slavery, and they returned to Black communities throughout the United States with just such news, helping to agitate and organize for change.

The colored boys frothed and speculated and stared off in class, slacked off in the sweet potato fields. Mulling the prospect of a black champion: One of them victorious for a change, and those who kept you down whittled to dust, seeing stars.

For many blacks, the racism towards Obama was symptomatic of the unresolved problem of the color line.

they looked like surveillance photos of themselves,

The Assembly was led by the thirty-seven-year-old Alfred E. Smith, a seven-term veteran from the Lower East Side, son of an Irish mother and an Italian-German father, a vital cog in the Tammany organization who despite an eighth-grade education had demonstrated a political savvy that catapulted him ahead of a legion of better-educated, more seasone

At first, the veil under which Russell’s feelings had been cloaked fell away only in private. There had always been scattered hints in private; years before, while he was professing on the Senate floor that “I have no greater rights because I am a white man,” he had written in a letter marked “confidential”: “Any southern white man worth a pinch of

Almost constantly and almost everywhere black men were being faced with this kind of duality. Whites were saying the right things, showing deep concern over injustices, expressing determination to resolve the problems of racism, but never really consulting with black people as equals.