So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades.
Du Bois explains that the profound economic and social changes of Emancipation led to a natural process of social differentiation and challenges within the Black community.
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.