W.E.B. Du Bois: “The plague-spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation.”

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.

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

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.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.