W.E.B. Du Bois: “Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages…”

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

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.

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

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.