With a harshness and indecency seldom paralleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland sold their mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their own wives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands.
Du Bois highlights the brutal realities of how white masters exploited their own kin during slavery.
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Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…