W.E.B. Du Bois: “We would hear the birds sing and see how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty.”

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

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

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