We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost dropped from view.
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.
gutenberg.org
The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal results of this policy.
Such a situation is bound to increase crime, and has increased it.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro?
I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime.
Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest?
Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity?
How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it?
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good…
With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.
But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said…
The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating.