W.E.B. Du Bois: “Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking?”

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…

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…

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

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