W.E.B. Du Bois: “First and naturally they assumed the panoply of the ancient African mother of men, strong and black, whose very nature…”

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

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.

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.