had been
either apologetic or self-assertive, but Dunbar "studied the Negro
objectively." He represented him as he found him, not only without
apology, but with an affectionate understanding and sympathy which one
can have only for what is one's own. In Dunbar, Negro literature
attained an ethnocentric point of view. Through the medium of his verses
the ordinary shapes and forms of the Negro's life have taken on the
color of his affections and sentiments, and we see the black man, not as
he looks, but as he feels and is.

It is a significant fact that a certain number of educated--or rather
the so-called educated--Negroes were not at first disposed to accept at
their full value either Dunbar's dialect verse or the familiar pictures
of Negro life which are the symbols in which his poetry usually found
expression. The explanation sometimes offered for the dialect poems was
that "they were made to please white folk." The assumption seems to have
been that if they had been written for Negroes it would have been
impossible in his poetry to distinguish black people from white. This
was a sentiment which was never shared by the masses of the people, who,
upon the occasions when Dunbar recited to them, were fairly bowled over
with amusement and delight because of the authenticity of the portraits
he offered them. At the present time Dunbar is so far accepted as to
have hundreds of imitators.

Literature and art have played a similar and perhaps more important role
in the racial struggles of Europe than of America. One reason seems to
be that racial conflicts, as they occur in secondary groups, are
primarily sentimental and secondarily economic. Literature and art, when
they are employed to give expression to racial sentiment and form to
racial ideals, serve, along with other agencies, to mobilize the group
and put the masses _en rapport_ with their leaders and with each other.
In such cases art and literature are like silent drummers which summon
into action the latent instincts and energies of the race.

These struggles, I might add, in which a submerged people seek to rise
and make for themselves a place in a world occupied by superior and
privileged races, are not less vital or less important because they are
bloodless. They serve to stimulate ambitions and inspire ideals which
years, perhaps, of subjection and subordination have suppressed. In
fact, it seems as if it were through conflicts of this kind, rather than
thro