W.E.B. Du Bois: “But is it not education that is the creator of this freedom and equality?”

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.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

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.

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