W.E.B. Du Bois: “It was this competition for the labor of yellow, brown, and black folks that was the cause of the World War.”

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

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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.