W.E.B. Du Bois: “So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had…”

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

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.

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.