‘Poor race in a land of dollars’

W.E.B. DuBois in 1918

The title page of Du Bois's Harvard dissertation. 

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’’

— W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), in his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk

The African-American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil-rights activist was born and raised in Great Barrington, Mass., in The Berkshires, a relatively tolerant and integrated community, compared to much of the United States at the time.