W.E.B. Du Bois: “Does England propose to erect in India and Nigeria nations brown and black which shall be eventually independent…”

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.

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.

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.

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