W.E.B. Du Bois: “The degradation of the African must have been otherwise caused than by natural inferiority.”

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.