W.E.B. Du Bois: “But out of the stink of the stockyards and the dust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willing…”

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

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.