W.E.B. Du Bois: “It was an unfortunate circumstance, that it was the disposition of religious sects to imagine they understood the rights…”

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.