W.E.B. Du Bois: “They saw a people whose helpless women have been raped by thousands and whose men lynched by hundreds in the face of a…”

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

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.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

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.