W.E.B. Du Bois: “Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s…”

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

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

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.