W.E.B. Du Bois: “Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant.”

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

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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…

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.