W.E.B. Du Bois: “Harvard was the goal of my dreams, but my white friends hesitated and my colored friends were silent.”

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

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.

The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.

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…