No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Du Bois explains the prevailing belief during Reconstruction that granting suffrage to former slaves would necessitate their education by the broader society.
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The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…
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.
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.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.