Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould.
Du Bois employs a botanical metaphor to illustrate that social progress for a group is an organic, gradual process, not an instantaneous uplift, with historical roots remaining influential.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
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.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.