W.E.B. Du Bois: “It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which…”

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

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.

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…

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!