Then they took the convicts from the plantations, but not until one of the fairest regions of the “Oakey Woods” had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.
Du Bois vividly portrays the lasting environmental and human cost of the convict lease system and subsequent exploitative land practices.
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A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.