W.E.B. Du Bois: “So the city crowned her hundred hills with factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long…”

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

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

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…

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.