For at least a century, in the West Indies and the southern United States, agriculture flourished, trade increased, and English manufactures were nourished, in just such proportion as Americans stole Negroes and worked them to death.
Du Bois highlights the economic benefits derived from the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the Americas.
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Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.
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…
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.