“I believe I know my own people pretty thoroughly. I know them all classes, the high and the low, and have yet to see any young man or young woman who had the spirit of work in them before, driven from labor by a college education.”

Defending the value of learning against claims it unfits people for work · Essay on higher education for African Americans

• Belief
• Education
• Work

“It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.”

Expressing cautious hope amid the shadows of racial struggle · Essay, Representative American Negroes, 1903

• Dawn
• Hope
• Progress

“I have never been able to determine whether I am a poet who writes prose or a prose writer who writes poetry.”

Capturing his fluid movement between poetic and prose forms · Conversation, as commonly attributed

• Art
• Poetry