W.E.B. Du Bois: “Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the…”

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.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.