W.E.B. Du Bois: “I know not which are the more touching,—such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters’ sons.”

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.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

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