3

3

Black people were slaves in every way but legally. Most could not vote. Nearly everyone who had any education at all attended inadequate, segregated schools, and then only a few months a year. Most could not hope to gain an education beyond high school. Most worked as farmers or semi-skilled laborers. Few owned the land they farmed, or even the homes in which they lived.

DuBois described black life and the world a black man might see:

"He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, 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. He felt the weight of his ignorance, - not simply of letters but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and his feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home."²

Six years after the NAACP was born, the nation's first full-length feature film, "The Birth of a Nation," appeared. It was perfect propaganda, a distorted epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction, with blacks portrayed as lustful and ignorant and slaveholders as wise and benevolent. The movie received a private showing in Woodrow Wilson's White House and eventually would be seen by over 200 million people. With cinematic techniques that gave it a sheen of historical authenticity, the movie's spectacular lies became historical truth - southern virtue, honesty and civility destroyed by barbaric blacks and covetous carpetbaggers. Not coincidentally, the years 1915 to 1924 saw Ku Klux Klan membership rise to 4.5 million.