I emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but hugging to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto stubbornness, to fight the good fight.
Du Bois describes his emergence into adulthood, marked by both loss and determination.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…