Can the modern organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and powerless in its own defence?
This passage, from his seminal work, questions the viability of modern industrial organization in the American South given the disenfranchisement of Black laborers.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
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.