hurch or
community life, the platform--all are tinctured deeply with these
ideas and these are expressed in some form on every possible occasion.
All these questions are in a large degree to the race, as far as
interest is concerned, at least, the momentous, the ever-present,
ever-burning topic.

No youth of the white race feels the weight of any subject agitating
the mind of the public as these colored youth feel this one. What is
the omen, when boys and girls alike make it a common question, in some
form or other for all their daily work? It has been said that the two
races are growing apart, that there is as much race prejudice in the
one as in the other. In many respects this is true, though the
prejudice on the part of the Negro is a thing of natural growth from
certain causes, not an inherent quality. The fact that the Negro is
rising without anything like adequate recognition--at least other than
a patronizing one--is one of these causes. As here and there the Negro
comes, to the white man's higher level, among the best he is
confronted with that "Ah-you-are-here." Ah, which means more than
words can express and he straightway feels his pulses stirred to the
defensive counter spirit of
"I-am-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it?" The result is the two
mutually draw back from each other.

Among the middle classes where the level of the whites intellectually
and financially is more readily and more rapidly being reached by the
greater number of Negroes there is still more prejudice to be found.
It is here where the Negro has his fiercest battle ground; it is here
where he finds his greatest opposition. It is only following out the
idea of the French writer who said, "Mediocrity alone is jealous." The
constant desire of this class of white people to rise to the highest
level aggravates them upon seeing a Negro reaching out for or
obtaining in any way that which they may have or may be seeking, and
they "take it out" by greater assumption of superiority especially
over those of the race who have reached their own plane of living, and
here again is a creation of a counter prejudice.

Growing refinement brings with it to the Negro all that sensitiveness
which is accorded to refined people wherever found, and naturally he
recoils from rebuffs, insults, and contumely, and holds himself aloof
more and more only as business demands contact. He has no growing
reason to revere the whites as a mass, and if nations are pr