W.E.B. Du Bois: “Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant…”

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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.

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.

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.