Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/274

262 community is taking charge of the education of children for this reason.

In America the work of Negro women has not only pre-figured this development but it has had a direct influence upon it. The Negro woman as laborer, as seamstress, as servant and cook, has come into competition with the white male laborer and with the white woman worker. The fact that she could and did replace the white man as laborer, artisan and servant, showed the possibility of the white woman doing the same thing, and led to it. Moreover, the usual sentimental arguments against women at work were not brought forward in the case of Negro "womanhood. Nothing illustrates this so well as the speech of Sojourner Truth before the second National Woman Suffrage Convention, in 1852.

Sojourner Truth came from the lowest of the low, a slave whose children had been sold away from her, a hard, ignorant worker without even a name, who came to this meeting of white women and crouched in a corner against the wall. “Don’t let her speak,” was repeatedly said to the presiding officer. “Don’t get our cause mixed up with abolition and ‘niggers’.” The discussion became warm, resolutions were presented and argued. Much was said of the superiority of man’s intellect, the general helplessness of women and their