And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work.
Du Bois identifies a primary cause of Black economic hardship as the belief among white employers that debt is necessary to compel Black labor.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes…
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.