In many instances this system has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the protection and guidance of the former master’s family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality.
Du Bois acknowledges that the system of white patronage sometimes provided genuine support and opportunities for Black freedmen.
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The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for…
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.