W.E.B. Du Bois: “Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the…”

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.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…

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.