And for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession?
Du Bois poses a rhetorical question to emphasize the vast number of Black laborers and tenants forced to leave rural areas due to harsh economic conditions.
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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.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.