# Sam Scott — The Souls of Black Folk character guide

> Sam Scott in The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Sam

**First appearance:** 0009-vii-of-the-black-belt

## Snapshot

A Black farmer in the Black Belt whose hardscrabble life dramatizes how tenancy, debt, and the color line grind down post-Reconstruction ambition.

## Who they are

Sam Scott works the rocky Georgia hills the narrator rides through, one of the many Black tillers whose labor enriches others while barely feeding their own. His circumstances expose the economic machinery—crop liens, uncertain wages, the constant threat of falling further—that turns freedom into a slow foreclosure. He matters because his struggle is the book's ground truth: the abstract 'Negro problem' made flesh in a man trying to keep his family fed.

## In the story

### [Of the Black Belt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_souls_of_black_folk_se/chapters/vii-of-the-black-belt)

A field-hand who, when asked about rent, replies 'All we make,' illustrating the exploitative sharecropping system.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_souls_of_black_folk_se/characters/sam_scott
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_souls_of_black_folk_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_souls_of_black_folk_se/characters