Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began.
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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The legal form of service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or “cropping” was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with…
But with all this, it is work in the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce.
We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife.
It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings.
Perhaps ten per cent compose the well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent are thoroughly lewd and vicious.
Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant.
The Negro church has done much to stop this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the pastors.
Sometimes these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and a broken household is…
To-day Sam’s grandson “takes up” with a woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and wife.
Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest.
There is little or no prostitution among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found by house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people with considerable regard for female chastity.