W.E.B. Du Bois: “This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty.”

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.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

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

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