W.E.B. Du Bois: “We have kicked and cursed minorities as upstarts and usurpers when their sole offense lay in not having ideas or hair…”

A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

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.