W.E.B. Du Bois: “Once degrade the laborer so that he cannot assert his own rights, and there is but one limit below which his price…”

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

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