If the tenant worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “If the tenant worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the crop failed, his…”
Editor's note · Context
This passage from "The Souls of Black Folk" illustrates the severe economic precarity and injustice faced by Black tenant farmers.
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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.
Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.
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.