W.E.B. Du Bois: “Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not unkind.”

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…

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

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.