W.E.B. Du Bois: “Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk?”

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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.

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.