He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.
Du Bois explains the decline of both the "old Negro" and "Southern gentleman" types as a result of the transformation of freedom into a struggle for economic survival.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
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.