The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.
This quote describes the intense and violent resistance to Black education in the post-Civil War South, rooted in the belief that educated Black people posed a threat to the existing social order.
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The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
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.
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.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.