And thus the land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.
Du Bois analyzes the challenging reality of Black landownership in the post-Reconstruction South, where gains were often temporary.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
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.
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!