W.E.B. Du Bois: “So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.”

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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…