W.E.B. Du Bois: “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only…”

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

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.

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