Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.
Du Bois describes how the experience of living a "double life" under the Veil of Color leads to internal conflicts and societal pressures, fostering either pretense or radicalism.
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A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
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.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.