W.E.B. Du Bois: “It is not--it cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is too serene--its beauty too divine!”

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

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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.

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.