W.E.B. Du Bois: “For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows?”

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…

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

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…