“For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.” WorkCapitalismLaborAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhites Book:The Souls of Black Folk Source: The Souls of Black Folk
“But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?” RaceEducationKnowledgeLearningTrainingAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhites Book:The Souls of Black Folk Source: The Souls of Black Folk
“The white people of the South are essentially a fine kindly breed, the same sort of human beings that one finds the world over.” HistoryRacismRace RelationsReconstructionSouthernersLynchingsPoor Whites Book:Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 Source: Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
“It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.” SlaverySouthVotingAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsReconstructionSuffrageVoting Rights Book:The Souls of Black Folk Source: The Souls of Black Folk