The census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons, and in some Southern States one in every two persons.
Here, Du Bois provides statistical evidence of the prevalence of Negro churches in the United States.
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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.
The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race!
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.