W.E.B. Du Bois: “A revolution such as that of ’63 is a terrible thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in paupers’ beds.”

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…