W.E.B. Du Bois: “America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.”

This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of…

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

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