Jan 1, 1903
The size and arrangements of a people’s homes are no unfair index of their condition.
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
The form and disposition of the laborers’ cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same as in slavery days.
Jan 1, 1903
This is the direct heritage of the South from the wasteful economies of the slave régime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves.
Jan 1, 1903
The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense.
Jan 1, 1903
All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and culture.
Jan 1, 1903
And yet how little we really know of these millions,—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes!
Jan 1, 1903
Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.
Jan 1, 1903
So the Negro forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.
Jan 1, 1903
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.