" To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night. "

― Langston Hughes ,