Usually there is no step to help you climb on and often the car is a smoker cut in two and you must pass through the white smokers or else they pass through your part, with swagger and noise and stares.
This passage describes the uncomfortable and often degrading conditions faced by Black passengers on trains.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
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.