W.E.B. Du Bois: “What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all?”

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.

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

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

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.