W.E.B. Du Bois: “Yet the American Negroes stand today as the greatest strategic group in the world.”

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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

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.

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.