h as in the South, but an
increasing disposition to enforce racial distinctions in the North, as
in the South, is bringing it into existence.

One or two incidents in this connection are significant. A few years ago
a man who is the head of the largest Negro publishing business in this
country sent to Germany and had a number of Negro dolls manufactured
according to specifications of his own. At the time this company was
started, Negro children were in the habit of playing with white dolls.
There were already Negro dolls on the market, but they were for white
children and represented the white man's conception of the Negro and not
the Negro's ideal of himself. The new Negro doll was a mulatto with
regular features slightly modified in favor of the conventional Negro
type. It was a neat, prim, well-dressed, well-behaved, self-respecting
doll. Later on, as I understand, there were other dolls, equally tidy
and respectable in appearance, but in darker shades, with Negro features
a little more pronounced. The man who designed these dolls was perfectly
clear in regard to the significance of the substitution that he was
making. He said that he thought it was a good thing to let Negro girls
become accustomed to dolls of their own color. He thought it important,
as long as the races were to be segregated, that the dolls, which, like
other forms of art, are patterns and represent ideals, should be
segregated also.

This substitution of the Negro model for the white is a very interesting
and a very significant fact. It means that the Negro has begun to
fashion his own ideals and in his own image rather than in that of the
white man. It is also interesting to know that the Negro doll company
has been a success and that these dolls are now widely sold in every
part of the United States. Nothing exhibits more clearly the extent to
which the Negro had become assimilated in slavery or the extent to
which he has broken with the past in recent years than this episode of
the Negro doll.

The incident is typical. It is an indication of the nature of tendencies
and of forces that are stirring in the background of the Negro's mind,
although they have not succeeded in forcing themselves, except in
special instances, into clear consciousness.

In this same category must be reckoned the poetry of Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, in whom, as William Dean Howells has said, the Negro "attained
civilization." Before Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Negro literature