W.E.B. Du Bois: “And if all this be a lie, is it not a lie in a great cause?”

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.