W.E.B. Du Bois: “The most obvious question which this study suggests is: How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong safely be…”

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

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.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

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