“I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on the earth,” the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois prayed in 1904 in his prose-poem “Credo,” anticipating a world without aggressive conflict or race war. “I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder,” he continued. “I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong; and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.” But it would take a long time. “Finally, I
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