W.E.B. Du Bois: “For the first time I faced criticism and cared.”

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.

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.

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.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.