W.E.B. Du Bois

This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead.

Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a half.

There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his crops,—he cannot under this system.

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.

The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution,—part banker, part landlord, part banker, and part despot.

And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal.

Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not even ownership of the rags on his back.

The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire,—the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who…

And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that leaves the toilers in debt.

But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.

Child-labor is to be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stunting physical development.

Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its…