W.E.B. Du Bois: “In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves…”

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

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.

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

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.