W.E.B. Du Bois

Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars.

Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest.

Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life.

In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges.

In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only…

For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men.

All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.

Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.

In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war.