W.E.B. Du Bois: “Such proceedings well illustrate the new tendency of the pro-slavery party to neglect the enforcement of the slave-trade…”

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…

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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