W.E.B. Du Bois: “I began to realize how much of what I had called Will and Ability was sheer Luck!”

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.