Jan 1, 1903
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Public Record
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor at Atlanta University and over the course of his life wrote many books and articles. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
★ Featured Quote
January 1, 1903
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1903
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
Jan 1, 1903
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.
Jan 1, 1903
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
Jan 1, 1903
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
Jan 1, 1903
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Jan 1, 1903
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
Jan 1, 1903
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.
Jan 1, 1903
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
Jan 1, 1903
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.