Held Back by Poverty

Mary Kate Ryser-Oatman

English 48B

January 16, 2009

Journal #4 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

"He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships" (Du Bois 899).

In this passage, Du Bois describes how black men find themselves and others around them living in poverty. He states that when you are poor it is one thing, but when you are part of a poor race in a country full of wealth, then a person can really feel the blow of poverty.

I thought this quote was really significant in order to understand how the freed slaves felt when they tried to get on with their lives. Most of the black men were not able to find work soon after they were freed because of the prejudice they faced in the South. Most of them had been slaves for so long; that it was all they knew. They had no clue how to start their own life and earn a living, since they were forced to do manual labor and were not paid for it. Most of the black men had a hard time finding homes for themselves and their family, and it was near impossible for them to own property. Their neighbors were also usually former slaves, and they were probably in the same position.

The second sentence in the quote was really significant to me. I felt that it described the situation they were in. They were poor and probably living in poverty, but they were in general a poor race. The black men and women were all of a sudden free, and they could leave the plantations they worked on. Their entire race was thrown into this new world, where you were not guaranteed a place to sleep and food was not easy to come across. Money was needed for almost everything, and to obtain money a person needs a job. To be living in a place where there was so much wealth but not to have any of it, that must be really hard and I can not imagine having to live in that situation. There are so many people who have so much wealth that it would take them years to spend all of it, while there are people who have so little they struggle every single day. I wonder if when they were freed, if they imagined that they would have to face so many hardships just to live an ordinary life decades later, or if they thought that since they were freed, things would only become easier in a short time.

According to Wikipedia, W.E.B. Du Bois did not know a lot about slavery from his family's perspective, "Du Bois was born and grew up in the overwhelmingly white town of Barrington, Massachusetts. Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small, free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state." Du Bois was not born into slavery, and his parents were not born into slavery, so he did not experience the severity of the poverty that occurred when they were freed. He was also born in the North, so while there was racism there, it did not compare to the racism people faced in the South.