W.E.B. Du Bois: “Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting.”

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

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.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.