W.E.B. Du Bois: “The narrower the appeal, the poorer the culture; the wider the appeal the more magnificent are the possibilities.”

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

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…

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.