“The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.”

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist, born in 1868 and died in 1963. He became a leading public intellectual of the 20th century and was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. He taught at Atlanta University and wrote many books and articles over the course of his life. His work focused on race, education, history, and Black political life, and in his later years he lived in Ghana before dying in Accra.