W.E.B. Du Bois

Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until the free-labor market was nearly ruined by wholesale migration.

Then they took the convicts from the plantations, but not until one of the fairest regions of the “Oakey Woods” had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from…

How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did!

The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much.

It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil,—now, then, and before the war.

They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout this region.

There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro.

At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom.

Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing.

As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered.

Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there;—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.

Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not even ownership of the rags on his back.