In a speech at the Negro History Meeting, Du Bois begins "I am increasingly afraid of the things which Negroes do not know today concerning the world in which they live." There are several factors blocking African Americans from gaining knowledge of the world, including American ethnocentrism, a corporate-controlled media, and the rising and often prohibitive cost of education. There has also been an emergence of an African American middle class that now seeks to replicate the power structures that hold most African Americans in poverty. "I am unhappy about American Negroes today, not as I used to be, chiefly because they were not citizens with equal rights, but because I ask when they get these rights as they surely will, what will they do with them, how will they act?" Real progress means the uplift of the many and the uplift of the many, according to Du Bois, can be brought about through the universal access to education and employment that the socialist nations provide. Also, African Americans must rebuild their literary culture that was once flourishing and is now dying. African Americans must buy and read books by black writers or such books will cease to be published.
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