W.E.B. Du Bois: “Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture,--all this…”

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.