Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas.
Du Bois summarizes the pervasive systems of control—peonage, labor restrictions, and white patronage—that dominated the rural Southern landscape.
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The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…