Included
here are several excerpts from statements by black leaders. Although they did
not speak at exactly the same time, their positions reflected the diversity of
opinions within communities of color (then referred to as Negro communities)
about how best to improve the place of black people in America.
* According to the
author, what should be the goals of the black community?
* To what degree does
the author believe black Americans have reached those
goals at the time he or she
is writing?
* What are the advantages to the author’s approach
to racial progress? What are
the disadvantages?
1)
MARCUS GARVEY
Editorial
Letter
[New York, Sept. 1, 1920]
To the Negro People of the World,
Greeting:
We hereby beg to inform you that acting
under instructions from the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African
Communities League of the World, an international convention of Negroes,
representing every country in the world, was called, and said convention was
held in New York, United States of America, in sitting from the 1st to the 31st
of August, 1920.
The time has
come for the race to establish centralized authority in the control of its own
affairs and this convention with the power vested in it through its accredited
delegates, did elect and inaugurate into office the dignitaries herein
mentioned. The following is a list of the Universal Movement for the Redemption
of the Negro Race: [not included here]
All members of
the race will also uphold and give their support to the Declaration of Rights,
which is now being published for universal circulation and which is published
in another part of this paper. Yours fraternally,
Editorial [New York, September 7, 1920]
Fellow Men of the Negro Race, Greeting:
The time has
come for the Negro to forget and cast behind him his hero worship and adoration
of other races, and to start out immediately, to create and emulate heroes of
his own.
We must
canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs, and elevate to positions of
fame and honor black men and women who have made their distinct contributions
to our racial history. Sojourner Truth is worthy of the place of sainthood
alongside of Joan of Arc; Crispus Attucks and George William Gordon are
entitled to the halo of martyrdom with no less glory than that of the martyrs
of any other race. Toussaint L'Ouverture's brilliancy as a soldier and
statesman outshone that of a Cromwell, Napoleon and Washington; hence, he is
entitled to the highest place as a hero among men. Africa has produced
countless numbers of men and women, in war and in peace, whose lustre and
bravery outshine that of any other people. Then why not see good and perfection
in ourselves?
Ours
the Right to Our Doctrine
We must
inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own without any apologies
to the powers that be. The right is ours and God's. Let contrary sentiment and
cross opinions go to the winds. Opposition to race independence is the weapon
of the enemy to defeat the hopes of an unfortunate people. We are entitled to
our own opinions and not obligated to or bound by the opinions of others.
A
Peep at the Past
If others
laugh at you, return the laughter to them; if they mimic you, return the
compliment with equal force. They have no more right to dishonor, disrespect
and disregard your feeling and manhood than you have in dealing with them.
Honor them when they honor you; disrespect and disregard them when they vilely
treat you. Their arrogance is but skin deep and an assumption that has no
foundation in morals or in law. They have sprung from the same family tree of
obscurity as we have; their history is as rude in its primitiveness as ours;
their ancestors ran wild and naked, lived in caves and in the branches of
trees, like monkeys, as ours; they made human sacrifices, ate the flesh of
their own dead and the raw meat of the wild beast for centuries even as they
accuse us of doing; their cannibalism was more prolonged than ours; when we
were embracing the arts and sciences on the banks of the Nile their ancestors
were still drinking human blood and eating out of the skulls of their conquered
dead; when our civilization had reached the noonday of progress they were still
running naked and sleeping in holes and caves with rats, bats and other insects
and animals. After we had already unfathomed the mysteries of the stars and
reduced the heavenly constellations to minute and regular calculus they were
still backwoodsmen, living in ignorance and blatant darkness.
Why
Be Discouraged?
The world
today is indebted to us for the benefits of civilization. They stole our arts
and sciences from Africa. Then why should we be ashamed of ourselves? Their
MODERN IMPROVEMENTS are but DUPLICATES of a grander civilization that we
reflected thousands of years ago, without the advantage of what is buried and
still hidden, to be resurrected and reintroduced by the intelligence of our
generation and our prosperity. Why should we be discouraged because somebody
laughs at us today? Who to tell what tomorrow will bring forth? Did they not
laugh at Moses, Christ and Mohammed? Was there not a Carthage, Greece and Rome?
We see and have changes every day, so pray, work, be steadfast and be not
dismayed.
Nothing
Must Kill the Empire Urge
As the Jew is
held together by his RELIGION, the white races by the assumption and the
unwritten law of SUPERIORITY, and the Mongolian by the precious tie of BLOOD,
so likewise the Negro must be united in one GRAND RACIAL HIERARCHY. Our UNION
MUST KNOW NO CLIME, BOUNDARY, or NATIONALITY. Like the great Church of Rome,
Negroes the world over MUST PRACTICE ONE FAITH, that of Confidence in
themselves, with One God! One Aim! One Destiny! Let no religious scruples, no
political machination divide us, but let us hold together under all climes and
in every country, making among ourselves a Racial Empire upon which "the
sun shall never set."
Allegiance
to Self First
Let no voice but your own speak to you
from the depths. Let no influence but your own raise you in time of peace and
time of war. Hear all, but attend only that which concerns you. Your first
allegiance shall be to your God, then to your family, race and country.
Remember always that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first
a Jew; the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can
do no less than being first and always a Negro, and then all else will take
care of itself. Let no one inoculate you for their own conveniences. There is
no humanity before that which starts with yourself. "Charity begins at
home." First to thyself be true, and "thou canst not then be false to
any man."
We
Are Arbiters of Our Own Destiny
God and Nature first made us what we
are, and then out of our own creative genius we make ourselves what we want to
be. Follow always that great law.
Let the sky and God be our limit, and
Eternity our measurement. There is no height to which we cannot climb by using
the active intelligence of our own minds. Mind creates, and as much as we
desire in Nature we can have through the creation of our own minds. Being at
present the scientifically weaker race, you shall treat others only as they
treat you; but in your homes and everywhere possible you must teach the higher
development of science to your children; and be sure to develop a race of
scientists par excellence, for in science and religion lies our only hope to
withstand the evil designs of modern materialism. Never forget your God.
Remember, we live, work and pray for the establishing of a great and binding
RACIAL HIERARCHY, the rounding of a RACIAL EMPIRE whose only natural, spiritual
and political limits shall be God and "Africa, at home and abroad."
Printed in the Negro World, 6 June 1925,
as a front-page editorial; written in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARY CHURCH TERRELL , President National
Association of Colored Women.
The
Progress of Colored Women
February 18, 1898
Fifty years
ago a meeting such as this, planned, conducted and addressed by women would
have been an impossibility. Less than forty years ago, few sane men would have
predicted that either a slave or one of his descendants would in this century
at least, address such an audience in the Nation's Capital at the invitation of
women representing the highest, broadest, best type of womanhood, that can be
found anywhere in the world. Thus to me this semi-centennial of the National
American Woman Suffrage Association is a double jubilee, rejoicing as I do, not
only in the prospective enfranchisement of my sex but in the emancipation of my
race. When Ernestine Rose, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone
and Susan B. Anthony began that agitation by which colleges were opened to
women and the numerous reforms inaugurated for the amelioration of their
condition along all lines, their sisters who groaned in bondage had little
reason to hope that these blessings would ever brighten their crushed and
blighted lives, for during those days of oppression and despair, colored women
were not only refused admittance to institutions of learning, but the law of
the States in which the majority lived made it a crime to teach them to read.
Not only could they possess no property, but even their bodies were not their
own. . . . But, from the day their fetters were broken and their minds released
from the darkness of ignorance to which for more than two hundred years they
had been doomed, from the day they could stand erect in the dignity of
womanhood, no longer bond but free, till
tonight, colored women have forged steadily ahead in the acquisition of knowledge
and in the cultivation of those virtues which make for good.
To use a
thought of the illustrious Frederick Douglass, if judged by the depths from
which they have come, rather than by the heights to which those blessed with
centuries of opportunities have attained, colored women need not hang their
heads in shame. Consider if you will, the almost insurmountable obstacles which
have confronted colored women in their efforts to educate and cultivate
themselves since their emancipation, and I dare assert, not boastfully, but
with pardonable pride, I hope, that the progress they have made and the work
they have accomplished, will bear a favorable comparison at least with that of
their more fortunate sisters, from the opportunity of acquiring knowledge and
the means of self-culture have never been entirely withheld. For, not only are
colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex,
but they are everywhere baffled and mocked on account of their race.
Desperately and continuously they are forced to fight that opposition, born of
a cruel, unreasonable prejudice which neither their merit nor their necessity
seems able to subdue. Not only because they are women, but because they are
colored women, are discouragement and disappointment meeting them at every
turn. Avocations opened and opportunities offered to their more favored sisters
have been and are tonight closed and barred against them. While those of the
dominant race have a variety of trades and pursuits from which they may choose,
the woman through whose veins one drop of African blood is known to flow is
limited to a pitiful few. So overcrowded are the avocations in which colored
women may engage and so poor is the pay in consequence, that only the barest
livelihood can be eked out by the rank and file. And yet, in spite of the
opposition encountered, the obstacles opposed to their acquisition of knowledge
and their accumulation of property, the progress made by colored women along
these lines has never been surpassed by that of any people in the history of
the world. . . .
With this
increase of wisdom there has sprung up in the hearts of colored women an ardent
desire to do good in the world. No sooner had the favored few availed
themselves of such advantages as they could secure than they hastened to
dispense these blessings to the less fortunate of their race. With tireless
energy and eager zeal, colored women have, since their emancipation, been
continuously prosecuting the work of educating and elevating their race, as
though upon themselves alone devolved the accomplishment of this great task. Of
the teachers engaged in instructing colored youth, it is perhaps no
exaggeration to say that fully ninety per cent are women. In the back-woods,
remote from the civilization and comforts of the city and town, on the
plantations reeking with ignorance and vice, our colored women may be found
battling with evils which such conditions always entail. Many a heroine, of
whom the world will never hear, has thus sacrificed her life to her to her
race, amid surroundings and in the face of privations which only martyrs can
tolerate and bear. Shirking responsibility has never been a fault with which
colored women might be truthfully charged. Indefatigably and conscientiously,
in public work of all kinds they engage, that they may benefit and elevate
their race.
The result of
this labor has been prodigious indeed. By banding themselves together in the
interest of education and morality, by adopting the most practical and useful
means to this end, colored women have in thirty short years become a great
power for good. Through the National Association of Colored Women, which was
formed by the union of two large organizations in July, 1896, and which is now
the only national body among colored women, much good has been done in the
past, and more will be accomplished in the future, we hope. Believing that it
is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great,
the National Association of Colored Women has entered that sacred domain.
Homes, more homes, better homes, purer homes is the text upon which our have
been and will be preached. Through mothers' meetings, which are a special
feature of the work planned by the Association, much useful information in
everything pertaining to the home will be disseminated. We would have
heart-to-heart talks with our women, that we may strike at the root of evils,
many of which lie, alas, at the fireside. If the women of the dominant race
with all the centuries of education, culture and refinement back of them, with
all their wealth of opportunity ever present with them--if these women feel the
need of a Mothers' Congress that they may be enlightened as to the best methods
of rearing children and conducting their homes, how much more do our women,
from whom shackles have but yesterday fallen, need information on the same
vital subjects? And so throughout the country we are working vigorously and
conscientiously to establish Mothers' Congresses in every community in which
our women may be found. . . .
Questions
affecting or legal status as a race are also constantly agitated by our women.
In Louisiana and Tennessee, colored women have several times petitioned the
legislatures of their respective States to repeal the obnoxious "Jim Crow
Car" laws, nor will any stone be left unturned until this iniquitous and
unjust enactment against respectable American citizens be forever wiped from
the statutes of the South. Against the barbarous Convict Lease System of
Georgia, of which negroes, especially the female prisoners, are the principal
victims, colored women are waging a ceaseless war. By two lecturers, each of
whom, under the Woman's Christian Temperance Union has been National
Superintendent of work among colored people, the cause of temperance has for
many years been eloquently
espoused.
In business,
colored women have had signal success. There is in Alabama a large milling and
cotton business belonging to and controlled entirely by a colored woman who has
sometimes as many as seventy-five men in her employ. In Halifax, Nova Scotia,
the principal ice plant of the city is owned and managed by one of our women.
In the professions we have dentists and doctors, whose practice is lucrative
and large. Ever since the publication, in 1773, of a book entitled "Poems
on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," by Phyllis Wheatley, negro
servant of Mr John Wheatley of Boston, colored women have from time to time
given abundant evidence of literary ability. In sculpture we are represented by
a woman upon whose chisel Italy has set her seal of approval; in painting, by
Bougerean's pupil, whose work was exhibited in the last Paris Salon, and in
Music by young women holding diplomas from the first conservatories in the
land.
And, finally,
as an organization of women nothing lies nearer the heart of the National
Association than the children, many of whose lives, so sad and dark, we might
brighten and bless. It is the kindergarten we need. Free kindergartens in every
city and hamlet of this broad land we must have, if the children are to receive
from us what it is our duty to give. Already during the past year kindergartens
have been established and successfully maintained by several organizations,
from which most encouraging reports have come. May their worthy example be
emulated, till in no branch of the Association shall the children of the poor,
at least, be deprived of the blessings which flow from the kindergarten alone.
The more unfavorable the environments of children, the more necessary is it
that steps be taken to counteract baleful influences on innocent victims.
How imperative
is it then that as colored women, we inculcate correct principles and set good
examples for our own youth, whose little feet will have so many thorny paths of
prejudice temptation, and injustice to tread. The colored youth is vicious we
are told, and statistics showing the multitudes of our boys and girls who crowd
the penetentiaries and fill the jails appall and dishearten us. But side by
side with these facts and figures of crime I would have presented and pictured
the miserable hovels from which these youth criminals come. Make a tour of the
settlements of colored people, who in many cities are relegated to the most
noisome sections permitted by the municipal government, and behold the mites of
humanity who infest them. Here are our little ones, the future representatives
of the race, fairly drinking in the pernicious example of their elders, coming
in contact with nothing but ignorance and vice, till at the age of six, evil habits
are formed which no amount of civilizing or Christianizing can ever completely
break. Listen to the cry of our children. In imitation of the example set by
the Great Teacher of men, who could not offer himself as a sacrifice, until he
had made an eternal plea for the innocence and helplessness of childhood,
colored women are everywhere reaching out after the waifs and strays, who
without their aid may be doomed to lives of evil and shame. As an organization,
the National Association of Colored Women feels that the establishment of
kindergartens is the special mission which we are called to fulfill. So keenly
alive are we to the necessity of rescuing our little ones, whose noble
qualities are deadened and dwarfed by the very atmosphere which they breathe,
that the officers of the Association are now trying to secure means by which to
send out a kindergarten organizer, whose duty it shall be both to arouse the
conscience of our women, and to establish kindergartens, wherever the means
therefore can be secured.
And so,
lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and
hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious
fruition ere long. With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a
keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look
forward to a future large with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of
our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice,
asking an equal chance.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
The Atlanta Exposition
Address
(1895)
One-third
of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the
material, civil, or moral welfare of our section can disregard this element of
our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr.
President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that
in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly
and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition
at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement
the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our
freedom.
Not
only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of
industry and progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in
the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom;
that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real
estate or industrial skill; that the political convention of stump speaking had
more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A
ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the
mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of
thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down you
bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!”
ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket
where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered “Cast down
your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last
heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh,
sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who
depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the
importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who
is their next door neighbor, I would say, “Cast down your bucket where you are”
– cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races
by whom we are surrounded.
Cast
it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the
professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever
other sins the South may be called to bear in mind that whatever other sins the
South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is
in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world,
and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this
chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom
we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions
of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as
we learn to dignify and glorify the common occupations of life; shall prosper
in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the
substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper
till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the soil as there is in
writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To
those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and
strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I
would repeat what I say to my own race: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose
fidelity and love you have tested in the days when to have proved treacherous
meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who
have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your
forests, builded your roads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the
bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation
of the progress of the South. . . . While doing this, you can be sure in the
future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the
most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people that the world has
seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your
children, watching by the sickbed of
your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-brimmed eyes to
their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a
devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need
be, in defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil and
religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races
one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
There
is no defence or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and
development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the
fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts
be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making them the most useful
and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per
cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed – “blessing him that gives
and him that takes.” . . . .
Gentlemen
of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of
our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with
ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered
from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the
inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines,
newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores
and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While
we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do
not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short
of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational
life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern
philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and
encouragement.
The
wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social
equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the
privileges that will come to us will be the result of severe and constant
struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to
contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is
important and right that all the privileges of the law be ours, but it is
vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.
The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory is infinitely more valuable than
the right to spend a dollar in an opera house.
In
conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope
and encouragement, and drawn us so to you of the white race, as this
opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the
altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and of mine,
both starting nearly empty-handed three decades ago. I pledge that in your
effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the
doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient and sympathetic
help of my race; only keep this constantly in mind, that from the
representations in these buildings of the product of the field, of forest, of
mine, of factory, letters and art, much good will come, yet far above the
material benefits will be that higher good that, let us pray God, will come in
a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions,
in a determining to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience in all
class to the mandates of law. This, then, coupled with our material prosperity,
will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
W.E.B. Du
Bois (1868–1963). The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
BETWEEN
me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some
through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly
framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a
half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then,
instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know
an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not
these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am
interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To
the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And
yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has
never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the
early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all
in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic
winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till
one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a
glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different
from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that
veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived
above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was
bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine
contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling
opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I
said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never
decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales
that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so
fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent
hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white;
or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger
in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all:
walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and
unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat
unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the
streak of blue above.
After
the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the
Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight
in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness,
but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is
a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.
The
history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to
attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer
self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He
would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for
he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make
it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed
and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed
roughly in his face ….
Away
back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of
all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such
unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far
as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the
cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a
promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears
and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it
came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and
passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
Years
have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life,
forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its
accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest
social problem:—
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