W.E.B. Du Bois: “Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent.”

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

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

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.

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…