W.E.B. Du Bois: “Suppose my good mother had preferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on the precarious dividend of…”

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

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…

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

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