W.E.B. Du Bois: “Of one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the glory of physical nature; this, though the…”

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.

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.

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.

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!