W.E.B. Du Bois: “His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain.”

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…

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

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.

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