W.E.B. Du Bois: “Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.”

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

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.

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…

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.