W.E.B. Du Bois: “And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world is beautiful.”

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 direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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