The NegroDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
History
The Negro
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
Africa -- History; Black race
On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is
tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred
million dollars' worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely
begun. The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars'
worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South
Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where
the result is blended in the common output of many races. The economic
foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many
hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.
Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of
the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor. "Tropical Africa and
its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex
of the economic influences that sway the western world."[113]
What do Negroes themselves think of these their problems and the attitude
of the world toward them? First and most significant, they are thinking.
There is as yet no great single centralizing of thought or unification of
opinion, but there are centers which are growing larger and larger and
touching edges. The most significant centers of this new thinking are,
perhaps naturally, outside Africa and in America: in the United States and
in the West Indies; this is followed by South Africa and West Africa and
then, more vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East
Central Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudan.
The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be merely a
narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing Negroes sense the
coming unities: a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of the
colored races, a new unity of men. The proposed economic solution of the
Negro problem in Africa and America has turned the thoughts of Negroes
toward a realization of the fact that the modern white laborer of Europe
and America has the key to the serfdom of black folk, in his support of
militarism and colonial expansion. He is beginning to say to these
workingmen that, so long as black laborers are slaves, white laborers
cannot be free. Already there are signs in South Africa and the United
States of the beginning of understanding between the two classes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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