W.E.B. Du Bois: “These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.”

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

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

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

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.