What did mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights; or, the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by his physical necessities to do this and not do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities; and we say, here, too, is a slave called a “free worker”, and slavery is merely a matter of name.

But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from what we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these vital respects than that with exists today in Europe or America. Its analogue today is the yellow, brown and black laborer in China and India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon; and it was this slavery that fell in America.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1935.