W.E.B. Du Bois: “The largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work.”

To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

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.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.