Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/175

Rh the daily insults you meet with in the streets of Boston; much more on public days of recreation, how are you shamefully abused, and that at such a degree that you may truly be said to carry your lives in your own hands. . ..

“My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labor under; for the darkest hour is before the break of day. My brethren, let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren six years ago, in the French West Indies. . . . But blessed be to God, the scene is changed, they now confess that God hath no respect of persons, and therefore receive them as their friends and treat them as brothers. Thus doth Ethiopia begin to stretch forth her hand from a sink of slavery to freedom and equality.”

A more subtle appeal was made by seven Massachusetts Negroes on taxation without representation. In a petition to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1780 they said: “We being chiefly of the African extract, and by reason of long bondage and hard slavery, we have been deprived of enjoying the profits of our labor or the advantage of inheriting estates from our parents, as our neighbors the white people do, having