He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide apart.
Du Bois uses a vivid metaphor to describe the pervasive and seemingly natural separation of racial groups in the American South.
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All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…