By 1934, Du Bois had come to a rather bitter turn. His fame did not change the fact that he was sixty-six years old, with no savings, and being overtaken by younger, more practical men. In addition to these problems, he faced his own growing pessimism—telling himself that the South was just as segregated, and the North more so, than they had been before he and the NAACP began their labors. Such thoughts boiled up into his shattering editorial for the January 1934 Crisis, in which he turned the entire NAACP philosophy on its head. Negroes should face the fact that they would die segregated, he
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