W.E.B. Du Bois: “On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had never met them before.”

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

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.