W.E.B. Du Bois: “The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars.”

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

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

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

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…