W.E.B. Du Bois: “I held back with more difficulty each day my mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.”

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

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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…

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.