W.E.B. Du Bois: “Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.”

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

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.