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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is the dominant crop in the land DuBois describes?
(a) Vegetables.
(b) Wheat.
(c) Corn.
(d) Cotton.

2. How does DuBois characterize the message that is contained in the sorrow songs?
(a) Veiled.
(b) Mystical.
(c) Obvious.
(d) Hidden.

3. What does DuBois say politics depends on?
(a) Integration of communities.
(b) Safety of voters.
(c) Education of the electorate.
(d) Purification of the ballot.

4. What is being brought, in the poem that opens Chapter 13?
(a) The human heart.
(b) Children.
(c) Refugees.
(d) Soldiers.

5. What was the first change in the Africans’ lives, according to DuBois?
(a) Transport on the slave ship.
(b) Seeing the murder of their parents by whites.
(c) Work on the cotton plantation.
(d) Being born into slavery.

6. What does DuBois say was the Negro’s first religion?
(a) Paganism.
(b) Nature worship.
(c) Voodoo.
(d) Christianity.

7. What kind of people does DuBois say the sorrow songs come from?
(a) Indomitable.
(b) Spiritual.
(c) Disappointed.
(d) Long-suffering.

8. What does DuBois say is the keynote of the Black Belt?
(a) Bitterness.
(b) Hope.
(c) Debt.
(d) Training.

9. Which church refused to admit Alexander Crummell?
(a) Catholic.
(b) Methodist.
(c) Baptist.
(d) Episcopal.

10. What kind of cabin does DuBois say is the exception the rule?
(a) The scrupulously neat.
(b) The filthy.
(c) The habitable.
(d) The ramshackle.

11. How long does it take John to come home?
(a) Four years.
(b) Seven years.
(c) Two years.
(d) One year.

12. What does DuBois say the sorrow songs grope toward?
(a) Rest.
(b) Return home.
(c) Justice.
(d) freedom.

13. What role does DuBois say the church plays in black culture?
(a) Financial center.
(b) Social center.
(c) Center of corruption.
(d) Intellectual center.

14. What effect does DuBois say the sorrow songs had on him, the first time he heard one?
(a) It transported him back to the South.
(b) It reminded him of his mother’s voice.
(c) He was frightened by it.
(d) He recognized it immediately.

15. In what way does DuBois say his son was fortunate?
(a) He was better loved than anyone else in DuBois’ family.
(b) He never had to contend with a world that would see him as inferior.
(c) He got to experience the sweetest part of life.
(d) He never learned language in order to curse being born.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does DuBois compare the plantation houses in Dougherty County with plantation houses in Virginia, in the time of slavery?

2. What does DuBois say his wife had had to do, to produce their son?

3. What is the problem the poet complains of in the poem that opens Chapter 9?

4. What groups almost never live close to each other?

5. What does DuBois say the sorrow songs are silent about?

(see the answer keys)

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