The South is not “solid”; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.
Du Bois challenges the monolithic view of the South, highlighting its internal struggles and the necessity of discerning judgment.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at…
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
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.