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While Du Bois was head of the Sociology Department at Atlanta University and editor of Phylon, he was invited to speak at Vassar College. The text of his lecture follows here. 

Of the social problems that must be faced anew, reconsidered and restated there is none of greater importance than that of the presence on the American continent of thirty millions of persons of Negro descent. Of these perhaps fifteen million have no visible intermixture of white blood, while the rest are of mixed European, Negro and American Indian descent. There are many other millions, perhaps thirty, who are in fact of Negro descent but with so large an infiltration of white blood that the Negro blood is not in evidence and sometimes quite unknown.
     Two considerations set this body of American immigrants apart: their visibility, – the fact that more easily than in the case of any other body of immigrants they can be recognized; and secondly, and closely aligned with the fact that the overwhelming majority were forcibly transported as chattel slaves and consequently are only a generation or two removed from the lowest social status. The union of color and status, therefore, has fixed in the minds of men a psychological reaction which must be taken into account. One could hardly be born in America, North or South, and not subconsciously regard color and low social status as inevitably connected. But there would be a difference in rationalizing this fact; in the United States color would [be] assume[d] to be the cause of the status of blacks; while in South America status would include Negroes and Indians for social and historical causes. In the West lndies white descent largely determines status while caste applies usually to unmixed Negro blood.
    It has been the fashion in practically every American nation to attempt to ignore the Negro-American as a problem. Even when this population affects other social problems, the situation is often considered and treated as though the Negro element were not there and did not greatly modify the conditions of the problem. For instance many books on immigration to the United States ignore entirely the Negro immigrant. When foreign immigrants are considered often the Negro is regarded neither as an immigrant nor as a native American. (Compare [Louis] Adamic's Two Way Passage.) When restriction of immigration into the United States was debated between 19i7 and i927, the basis gradually was changed from the proportion of the foreign born of different origin to consideration of the original racial stocks as the standard for future incomers. But at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, 19 per cent of the inhabitants of America were of Negro descent. It took some adroit wording of the law and administration of its provisions to avoid this uncomfortable fact, but it was avoided. Visitors to the West Indies, especially if they are from the United States, are surprised and intrigued at the fact that the \Vest Indies are predominantly Negroid, but they say little about it. Thereafter they leave the West Indies out of their consideration of democracy and equality; of general progress and development; without the openly stated reason, but with the reserve judgment that such development is either impossible or undesirable in a land of Negroes. Thus the West Indies and Central America tend to become a sort of international slum to be exploited by foreign capital and tourists.
    On the other hand, it is increasingly evident that we must in the future give more notice to this element among the nations of the Americas. When after this Second World War we come to consider the pressing social problems before us, the Negro is going to be an element in this problem, not simply because of his actual social condition, but because of the psychological reaction of his fellow citizens toward him. In the matter of poverty, for instance, which we are going to face after the war, not as an inevitable curse, but as something which will yield to remedial measures, we will have to remember and take account of the past. We will recall that the plight of labor in South America and the West Indies, makes poverty a pressing and immediate problem and that the condition of labor there finds its greatest and most convincing excuse in the fact that the labor of these countries is largely Negro and Indian. That Negroes and Indians will always be poor is accepted as both probable and bearable and the only solution will lie in their becoming white by absorption and white immigration. Until that time, former philosophy has assumed that poverty, disease and inefficiency must characterize the laboring class. Imported capital will thrive on low wage and servile conditions, while labor laws and unions will be few. In the same way in the United States the whole labor movement, especially in its attempt to fight poverty by unionization, has long been faced and frustrated by the fact that perhaps an eighth of that labor is of Negro descent and unless unionized, can be and has been widely used to break down the living standards and keep down wages of white labor. Skilled labor enclaves, like the locomotive engineers and the machinists, have maintained a purely racial exclusion from these unions; but where mass production has superseded special skills, the Negro worker competes as in the automobile industry. On the other hand, white labor because of inherited cultural patterns and surrounding public opinion is unwilling to recognize Negro laborers as fellow human beings. Often this resentment flares in riot and mob rule.
   Out of this situation arise, as children of poverty', disease and crime: a widespread incidence of communicable and dangerous disease, a great loss of time through sickness, and the death of millions of people in the prime of life. And also a great amount of crime evidenced, as crime always is, among the young, by stealing and fighting and low sex mores; and leading to bitter reprisals and large expense of police and courts; and to the continuous manufacture of a distinct criminal element not only in Harlem but over the land.
     What now is going to be said of a frontal attack on poverty after this war if this attack is to include not only the Southern United States and the Negro slums of New York and Chicago, but also Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras and Bahia? Will not the ready reply be: Impossible! Inconceivable! and would not the cost include dearer sugar and cocoa and a lower return on investment? Finally, there would be the one unanswerable reason against any action: Race. The alternative would be to arrack poverty among white workers only' but this cannot be done in America today.
     Stepping beyond this, we face even greater post-war difficulty, when we come to the problem of applying something of what we have been newly preaching and even screaming about democracy, after two wars to defend democracy have been fought. Long before these wars, there was the deliberate exclusion of the great majority of Negroes from political rights by reason of poverty and ignorance, in the West Indies and South America; the attempt to realize anything that could really be called democracy involves equality; equality of status based at least on approach to equality of income. So far as Negroes are not regarded as equals, there can be no real conception of a democracy which includes them. In the United States most Negroes have been disfranchised no matter what their social and intellectual status might be.

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