W.E.B. Du Bois: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

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

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.