W.E.B. Du Bois: “Twenty centuries before Christ a great cloud swept over seas and settled on Africa, darkening and well-nigh blotting out…”

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.

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

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

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.