W.E.B. Du Bois: “How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as…”

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

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…

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.