W.E.B. Du Bois: “Yet to save from the past the shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task.”

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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 direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.