Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,—the opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny.
Du Bois describes the absence of genuine social outreach and recognition of shared humanity between different societal strata in the segregated South.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.