Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form of contact between whites and blacks in the South,—political activity.
This passage from "The Souls of Black Folk" identifies the ballot as a crucial tool for progress and empowerment in the modern world.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
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.