W.E.B. Du Bois: “And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old…”

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

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

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.

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.