W.E.B. Du Bois: “Suddenly the world was full of the fragrance of sacrifice.”

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…

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.

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

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