Saxon ever degrade the
sons of women of Africa?

The Negro's next puzzle was the French, urbane, amenable and suave.
Negro emotions and French sensibilities mingled even without recourse to
the vehicle of language. Imbued with all the finer Latin qualities and
characteristics, the French ever invited the black man to a social world
which the Anglo-Saxon denied him. E.W. Lightner, writing as a war
correspondent, says:

"Long previous to the war thousands of blacks from various States
of Africa were in France, most especially Paris, at the
universities, in business and in the better ranges of service.
Everywhere and by all sorts and conditions of whites, they were
treated as equals. During several visits to the French capital I,
an American, knowing full well the prejudices of whites of this
country against the race, was amazed to see the cordial mingling of
all phases of the cosmopolitan population of the French capital.
Refined white men promenaded the streets with refined black women,
and the two races mingled cordially in studies, industries and
athletic sports. White and black artists had ateliers in common in
the Latin quarter...."

Thus, at hob and nob with the civilities and honors and embraces of this
social life, the Negro felt an unaccustomed giddiness seize him. This
giddiness was not caused by lack of social poise, nor incited by the
French, but it arose from the dilemma, or rather peril, in which the
French intercourse placed him with relation to the adjustment of darker
races to Anglo-Saxon civilization.

Nevertheless in 1914, the approach to this court of honour and equality
must be made by the Negro--and made under restraint sufficient to assure
Anglo-Saxon approval. This was, indeed, a complex problem. Traducers
proclaimed his undeveloped capacities; he answered with a claim of long
repressed aptitudes. They spoke of intolerable coalescence; he claimed
that the times demanded imperative coexistence. They said he had no
soul; he claimed the over-soul. They asserted his lecherous character;
he referred to statistics. But when they claimed he was pro-German, he
stripped for action. World war, and France, prostrate amid its terrors,
offered the Negro the great opportunity of the centuries to refute the
broadcast propaganda of his enemies.

Beyond the French appeared the German, ungainly, acrimonious and
obdurate. Part Saxon, part Hun, part Van