W.E.B. Du Bois: “But the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when the white world dinned in their ears.”

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

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.

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

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.