W.E.B. Du Bois: “Teach thinkers to think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must…”

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.

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.

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

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…