W.E.B. Du Bois: “The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women.”

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.