W.E.B. Du Bois: “Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support of…”

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.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.