The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.

Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

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 simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.