W.E.B. Du Bois: “That river of my birth was golden because of the woolen and paper waste that soiled it.”

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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

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