W.E.B. Du Bois: “In my town the saloon was the open door to hell.”

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!