W.E.B. Du Bois: “As makers of two million homes these women are today seeking in marvelous ways to show forth our strength and beauty and…”

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

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…