Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community.
This passage from "The Souls of Black Folk" describes how the lack of protection for black citizens in the South led to their exploitation by unscrupulous individuals.
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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.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
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.