let us show us braveAnd for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like me well face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! (334)Rage, which may have originated from grief of oppression, when pressed to the wall, will strike back.W. E. B. Du Bois, realizing that black society would not rest long in a state of inequality, explains,What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this war was , it is nothing to compare with that fight for freedomwhich black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must, and not one moment longer. (The Souls of White Folk 183-4)How long? Not long. Du Bois, having a prescient understanding of race relations in America, notably explained in 1903 that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line (Souls of Black Folk xxiii). Oh how true this statement proved to be as black America continued to press upward and white American continued to dominate and oppress!The Civil Rights Movement in AmericaBy the time the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s was in full swing, white America wondered in awe at the demonstration of black rage they witnessed. Many were aghast, wondering where all the penned up anger came from. Race riots and violence ravaged the country. Black spokesmen rose up from various organizations -- Black Panther Party, SNCC, Nation of Islam -- and proclaimed BLACK POWER! The rage witnessed was astronomical. Rage had finally boiled over. Martin Luther King, Jr., explained that the sweltering summer of the Negros legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality (I 103). The Civil Rights Movement has produced an explosion of black ...
