W.E.B. Du Bois: “That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily.”

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.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

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.