W.E.B. Du Bois: “The whole movement represented the economic revolt of the slave-consuming cotton-belt against their base of labor…”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

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.

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.