W.E.B. Du Bois: “This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream.”

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

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

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.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.