W.E.B. Du Bois: “These women are passing through, not only a moral, but an economic revolution.”

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.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.