W.E.B. Du Bois: “Even then, after a long and earnest crusade, the national sense of right did not rise to the entire abolition of…”

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

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.

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.