W.E.B. Du Bois: “Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.”

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

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.