W.E.B. Du Bois: “Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in the streets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home.”

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…

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

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

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.