W.E.B. Du Bois: “The cry for service as high as heaven, as wide as human feeling, seemed filling the earth.”

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

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.

A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.