W.E.B. Du Bois: “I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the dishonesty and deception, the flattery and cajolery…”

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…

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.