W.E.B. Du Bois: “Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and…”

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

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

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

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.