W.E.B. Du Bois: “He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the…”

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

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

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.

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…