W.E.B. Du Bois: “When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than…”

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

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.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.