W.E.B. Du Bois: “But Europe has done more to break down national barriers than any preceding culture.”

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

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.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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.