W.E.B. Du Bois: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.