W.E.B. Du Bois: “Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.”

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…

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

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.