W.E.B. Du Bois: “They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.”

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

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.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.