n scalawag, resulted in the rise of a powerful southern
partisanship, stunned only so long as military power held sway. Peonage
took place of colored free labor. Disproportionate appropriation of
taxes between blacks and whites lowered the Negro measurably year by
year. With the complete removal of military supremacy, the Ku Klux
courted publicity which it had hitherto shunned. A leader, the statesman
of the new era, in the person of the late Benjamin R. Tillman, of South
Carolina, appeared. He split the loose organization of southern
aristocracy with the blacks with lily white wedge, and trampled into
dust every agency which favored the black man. He deprived the black of
all weapons of offence or defence, disfranchised him, shunted him off
into the ghetto, and called the world to mock him in his lowly position.
This southern statesman lived to see the Solid South come into national
power in 1912. From that time, until the beginning of the world war in
1914, the American negro reached the lowest point of his political and
social status.

Compared with Anglo-Saxon, Frenchman, Italian, Austrian, German or
Russian, he was of an order and degree reputed farthest down. No
celebrity attached to his menial state. No distinction might be his as
an award from the courts of nations. Dignity, grandeur and majesty
applied to Guelphs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Theirs was all
arrogation of supereminence. And to them all, the Negro, throughout the
world, was, if a man at all, pre-eminently the mere Man Friday.

From such a status of debasement, existing in an intolerable atmosphere
of derogation and disrepute, the humble and humiliated American Negro
sought the exaltation of international honor. Denied and disavowed at
home, through vicissitude of international war, he hoped for affirmation
of a new world dictum in acknowledgment of his human qualities and
worth. He did not, like Toussaint, long for the high honors of the
continental emperor. He sought democratic equality, and he would as lief
think of bringing the Kaiser to his level as exalting himself to the
plane of that immortal celebrity.

He wanted to make good in public. He wanted to demonstrate both
efficiency and initiative. He desired that popular belief conceive him
as a man, not a monkey. He wished the Caucasian world to take into its
head that he might function as a valuable and serviceable element of
twentieth century civilization. He yearned to reveal his powers