W.E.B. Du Bois: “Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, so penetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth.”

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

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.