W.E.B. Du Bois: “The Wizard of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy dark soil.”

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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

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.

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