Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction,—“improvement” companies, wine companies, mills and factories; most failed, and the Jew fell heir.
Du Bois recounts the speculative economic ventures that emerged during Reconstruction in the South, noting their general failure and the subsequent shift in ownership.
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After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.