The words of W. E. B. DuBois and those of Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton a half century later represent a quandary for African Americans in their quest for political equality in America. By the turn of the century when DuBois wrote that to be a “poor race in the land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships,” the political gains that African Americans had received in the aftermath of the Civil War had vanished. Confined to the land that had held them in bondage during slavery with the backing of vigilante violence and the legal complicity of the federal and southern state governments to boot, most African Americans struggled in a state of semiservitude for more than a half a century. Even though DuBois debated Booker T. Washington over the need to restore blacks' citizenship rights, favoring the fight for political rights over Washington's strategy of blacks building a firm economic foundation to prove themselves citizens before the white world, DuBois, as this quote suggests and as he would realize decades later, recognized blacks' political limitations in a society that marginalized blacks as both citizens and workers.