W.E.B. Du Bois: “We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so often involved were never deceived.”

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

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

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