W.E.B. Du Bois: “These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.”

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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…

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

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