W.E.B. Du Bois: “How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life…”

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

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…

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.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.