W.E.B. Du Bois: “All children are the children of all and not of individuals and families and races.”

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

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

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

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…