W.E.B. Du Bois: “So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had…”

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.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.