He muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said: “White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin’ down gits all.
Du Bois quotes a Black laborer expressing the injustice of their situation compared to white landowners.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.