The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
In his exploration of Black American life, Du Bois describes the bewildering experience of a generation for whom slavery was a distant memory.
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So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
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.