W.E.B. Du Bois: “We did buy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it.”

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

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.