W.E.B. Du Bois: “It drops as drops the night on southern seas--vast, sudden, unanswering.”

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.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…