W.E.B. Du Bois: “Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleam of world-hate.”

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…