W.E.B. Du Bois: “For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation…”

Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

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

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.