W.E.B. Du Bois: “The snarl of years was not to be undone in days.”

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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!

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…