ve no right to sit silently by
while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our
children, black and white.

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly.
The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past,
and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to
no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the
South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the
South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the ferment of social
change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to
praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to
condemn the good. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what
the South needs,--needs it for the sake of her own white sons and
daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral
development.

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is
not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner
hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers
wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his
upward development, while others--usually the sons of the masters--wish
to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to
maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially
in property, life, and limb. Through the pressure of the money-makers,
the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in
the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who
fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged
his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused
to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of
thought and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against
"the South" is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor
Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page,
and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the
imperative duty of thinking black men.

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several
instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to
the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama
constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in
other ways has openly or silently set his influence