W.E.B. Du Bois: “Two questions naturally arise, if we ratify the Constitution: Shall we do anything by our act to hold the blacks in…”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

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

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…