W.E.B. Du Bois: “Suddenly the world was full of the fragrance of sacrifice.”

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

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

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.

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…