W.E.B. Du Bois: “Today, therefore, we are challenging this ownership; we are demanding general consent as to what materials shall be…”

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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

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

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.