W.E.B. Du Bois: “Education to the modern world is a burden which we are driven to carry.”

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

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

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…