W.E.B. Du Bois: “I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death!”

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

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.

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

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.