Get out the lunch-box of your dreams,
Bite into the sandwich of your heart,
And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams
Then - like an atom bomb - it bursts apart.
- Langston Hughes
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song . . . in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness . . . and lay the foundations of the vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. — W.E.B. Du Bois
