W.E.B. Du Bois: “The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars.”

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

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.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!