Sarah

“I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: an autobiography

“Most of the founding fathers were like that; they spoke of freedom but did not offer it to everyone. They had bodies in their closets.”
― Amber McBride, Me: Moth

“Education is not a thing apart from life—not a "system," nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live and how to work.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: an autobiography

“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. One ever feels his two-ness,—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.

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. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. 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.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk