W.E.B. Du Bois: “Just as employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolize labor and beat a giant's bargain.”

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.

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.

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.

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.