The high and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder the mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargain with employers.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The high and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder the mass of laborers strove to unionize…”
Editor's note · Context
Du Bois discusses the dynamics of labor and the exploitation of workers by those in power.
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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…
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.