W.E.B. Du Bois: “Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers?”

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.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

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

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…