Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould.
Du Bois employs a botanical metaphor to illustrate that social progress for a group is an organic, gradual process, not an instantaneous uplift, with historical roots remaining influential.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.
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.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.