"This enforced subordination, according to the progressive black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, was the true meaning of slavery. "But there was . . . a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today," Du Bois wrote. "It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual."