Jan 1, 1903
I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization.
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
There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests power,—a naked grandeur, as it were.
Jan 1, 1903
He walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres.
Jan 1, 1903
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields.
Jan 1, 1903
Only black tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must.
Jan 1, 1903
They walk up and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home—happy? well no, not exactly happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.
Jan 1, 1903
For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of the Cotton…
Jan 1, 1903
Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond.
Jan 1, 1903
The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine.
Jan 1, 1903
Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves.