W.E.B. Du Bois: “Here is the opportunity for the establishment of a nation that may never recur.”

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

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.

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

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.