And if this is the white South’s need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons! how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions!
This passage highlights the urgent and profound need for broad ideals and true culture among the sons of freedmen, even more so than for the white South.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.