W.E.B. Du Bois: “Why not always yield--always take what's offered,--always bow to force, whether of cannon or dislike?”

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.

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.

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.