W.E.B. Du Bois: “It is of but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or ugly,--the message is the thing.”

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

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

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.