4 pls.

The War of the rebellion is over, Negro slavery in America is no more,
and the days of reconstruction have passed into history.

Dr. DuBois in speaking of that period wrote: "Amid it all two figures
ever stand to typify that day to coming men: the one a gray-haired
gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay
in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its
abolition boded untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening
of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes. And the other
a form black with the mist of centuries, and aforetime bent in love
over the white master's cradle, rocked his sons and daughters to
sleep, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife to the world;
aye, too, had laid herself low to his lusts, and borne a tawny man
child to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the
winds by midnight marauders riding after niggers. These were the
saddest sights of that woeful day; and no man clasped the hands of
these two passing figures of the present-past, but hating they went to
their long home, and hating their children's children live to-day."

Would some power had clasped the hands of these "two fleeting figures
of the present-past!" Then those "marauders chasing niggers" would
have been subdued and there would not be so many bloody threads in the
weft of the history the New South has been weaving.

The "gray-haired gentleman" has left a grandson who has all the
culture and education money and thrift can buy. He is thrifty and
enterprising, law-abiding and conscientious. He has inherited
prejudices, yet he is sincere. He loves the South no less than did his
grandfather; but he loves the Union more. He would die to save the
Union; he lives to glorify the South. He is known as the new
Southerner and he is evolving a New South.

The "marauder chasing niggers" has left a grandson who is illiterate,
uncultured and thriftless. He despises manual labor, but is too poor
and too ignorant to live without doing it. Unfit to be the associate
of the new Southerner, and feeling himself too superior to mingle with
Negroes, he broods over his hardships and bemoans his fate. He is a
Negro hater and thirsts for the excitement of a lynching bee. This
condoned clog to the progress of Southern civilization is known as
white trash.

The "form black with the mist of centuries" has left two grandsons.

One is a thrifty, law-abiding gentl