W.E.B. Du Bois: “Everywhere stand the pines--the little dark and steadfast pines that smile not, neither weep, but wait and wait.”

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

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 shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…