W.E.B. Du Bois: “How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

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

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

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.