W.E.B. Du Bois: “Resolved, That all attempts to re-enslave them are unconstitutional, etc.”

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

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

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for…