W.E.B. Du Bois: “The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children…”

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

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

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 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.