They saw a people with heads bloody, but unbowed, working faithfully at wages fifty per cent. lower than the wages of the nation and under conditions which shame civilization, saving homes, training children, hoping against hope.
Du Bois describes the resilience and determination of Black workers despite facing severe economic disadvantages.
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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…
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
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.