W.E.B. Du Bois: “Athwart his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking his trained guns.”

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…

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

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.