Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to sexual immorality.
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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Lastly, among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer.
Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what better houses mean.
There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar reasons, give better work.
Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than that on which the Confederacy builded…
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise; Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.
On the strong and cunning few Cynic favors I will strew; I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies; From the patient and the low I will take the joys they know; They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased, The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!
I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month.
We did buy seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it.
It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling father wrote home from the city for money.
Yes, seven; but they hadn’t been to school this year,—couldn’t afford books and clothes, and couldn’t spare their work.