W.E.B. Du Bois: “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past…”

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.

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

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

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.