W.E.B. Du Bois: “Red murder reigns; All hell is loose; On gold autumnal air Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed; While high on hills…”

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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.

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…

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.