W.E.B. Du Bois: “The shrieks and agony often witnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet tongue, the iniquity of our system.”

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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…