W.E.B. Du Bois: “The longing to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-woman amid…”

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

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.

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

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.