W.E.B. Du Bois: “I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.”

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.

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.

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.