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.
This quote describes Du Bois's childhood realization of racial segregation and the metaphorical "veil" separating him from the white world.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.