The Negro in the South — W.E.B. Du Bois

Excerpt: ...What is it that makes a successful laboring force? It is laborers of education and natural intelligence, reasonably satisfied with their conditions, inspired with certain ideals of life, and with a growing sense of self-respect and self-reliance. How is the caste system of the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically 114 restricting his development; it is restricting his education so that the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and accomplishment; and finally, through these things, it is encouraging crime, and by the unintelligent and brutal treatment of criminals, it is developing more crime. This general attitude toward the main laboring class reflects itself less glaringly but as certainly in the treatment even of white laborers. So long as white labor must compete with black labor, it must approximate black labor conditions