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Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963

"The Souls of Black Folk"

Finally, there are the varying forms of
religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent en-
deavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in
the same communities are brought into contact with each
other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my
point of view, how the black race in the South meet and
mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw
in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on
the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the
other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the geographical
color-line varies, of course, in different communities. I know
some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of
the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-
tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older settlement of
whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in still
other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung
up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has
its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors
meet in close proximity.


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