W.E.B. Du Bois: “And yet,--and yet is it so easy to give up the dream of democracy?”

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

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.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!