A Negro Schoolmaster in the South
W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 account as a young, black schoolmaster in the South
W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 account as a young, black schoolmaster in the South
After Belgium, France, and Britain carved up Africa among themselves, Germany felt the need to catch up. W. E. B. Du Bois, who by 1915 had established himself as one of America’s leading writers and civil-rights activists, saw this competition for colonies as an underlying cause of the war.
Taking issue with Booker T. Washington, the author argues that blacks should attend college.
Du Bois gives voice to the aspirations of black Americans in the post-Civil War world.
A leading black intellectual surveys the government’s efforts to aid the freed slaves.
“In a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see.”
“What place in the future development of the South ought the negro college and college-bred man to occupy?”
“No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves?”
“It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”