W.E.B. Du Bois: “What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence.”

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.

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…

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

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.