W.E.B. Du Bois

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

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

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.

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

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

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

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

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

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.