W.E.B. Du Bois: “We would hear the birds sing and see how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty.”

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

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

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…