W.E.B. Du Bois

For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows?

In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart?

Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil!

In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?

The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!

I—yea, all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.

He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.

He knew no color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun.

Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness that thou must needs enter there,—thou, O Death?

Is not this my life hard enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death?

I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing—a childless mother.