W.E.B. Du Bois: “He never faltered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak…”

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

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.

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.