W.E.B. Du Bois: “A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields.”

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

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.

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

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.