The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has never returned to them.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own…”
Editor's note · Context
This passage from "The Souls of Black Folk" describes the post-Civil War shift of political and economic power away from the traditional Southern elite.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.