W.E.B. Du Bois: “Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?”

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.