Chapter 1 is a summary of the book. At the top of the second page he mentions the question that white people pose: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Like Baldwin discussed, black people are never just discussed as people in the US. They're a problem. Even the most sympathetic seeming see only problems. Problems to solve, solutions to fund, outcomes to assess and study. I can see the influence on Baldwin. I also see some echoes of this chapter in Fanon, when du Bois discusses the feelings of inferiority in a people whom du Bois saw as still very "underdeveloped."
Much of the second chapter concerns the roots of the under-development in the Freedmen's Bureau, which tried to protect African Americans during Reconstruction, but ultimately failed on so many levels. There's the aspect of the task that could never be done in a manner beyond reproach--taking millions of people and trying to help them join a new society while that society is being (hopefully) transformed in the aftermath of bloody war--and then there's the part that is fully deserving of reproach: The decision to end it.
I won't recount all the many failures, I'll just note one anecdote: Tthe New England school mistresses who headed south to introduce the idea of universal elementary education, and along the way introduced it to white and black alike. The whites of the south were kept in as feudal a state as the slaves were, because it was a feudal society.
