Jan 1, 1903
Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion.
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.
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Jan 1, 1903
They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.
Jan 1, 1903
And yet follow those boys: they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun; they work hard when they do work, and they work willingly.
Jan 1, 1903
Why do not the Negroes become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and statesman?
Jan 1, 1903
But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind.
Jan 1, 1903
The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.
Jan 1, 1903
The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,—a massing of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the…
Jan 1, 1903
Besides this, the chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the county between…
Jan 1, 1903
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas.
Jan 1, 1903
But the same system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a Negro to change his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes.
Jan 1, 1903
In many instances this system has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the protection and guidance of the former master’s family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality.
Jan 1, 1903
This is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the new-made freedman was put.