W.E.B. Du Bois: “Education to the modern world is a burden which we are driven to carry.”

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

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.

A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…