W.E.B. Du Bois

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…