W.E.B. Du Bois: “Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away?”

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.

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.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.