lower than the
policies of previous generations had brought him.

Directly to the President of all the United States he went. "Give us a
lift!" he cried, "We want to fight!" To the Secretary of War he shouted
most unceremoniously: "Give us place!" "But," was the indirect reply,
"we have not the facilities at present. For instance, we have no bedding
for the men whom you might muster." It was a young Negro Harvard
graduate, Thomas Montgomery Gregory, of New Jersey, who advanced before
Secretary Baker. "No bedding, Mr. Secretary? We will sleep on the
floor--on the ground--anywhere--give us a lift!"

The Anglo-Saxon mind is subject to orderly reactions. The Secretary of
War was taken aback. He realized that the young Negroes had not
approached him to sell their labor. He gleaned that it was not for the
purpose of barter and exchange they had come forward. Nor had they come
with dreams of political advantage and social eclat, nor with vague
glimmerings of spirituality. He was not ready to answer. He dismissed
the audience with a little more than the usual ceremony. One of the
older Negroes of the group, whose uncanny insight had often appeared
beyond the orbit of average intelligence, ventured this suggestion: "He
will put it up to Pershing."

And so the word got abroad that it would be left to Pershing as to how
the Negro should be disposed of. It would be left to John J. Pershing,
who in his earlier days had been instructor in a Negro college under
the American Missionary Association. It would be left to the man who in
1892 had been a First Lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry in connection with
the Sioux campaign in the Dakotas; who had been with the 10th Cavalry in
the Santiago campaign in 1898; who had led Negro troops in the
Philippines in 1899 till 1903, commanding operations in Mindanao against
the Moros; and who had been in command of the Negro troops sent into
Mexico in pursuit of Villa in March, 1916. It would be left to the man
whose whole life had been spent in close contact with darker races.

To this day the Negro does not know who was directly responsible for the
organization of the camp such as Spingarn proposed. It is probable that
the honor belongs as much to Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts as to any
one else. These black soldiers of Colonel Hayward's 15th New York
Regiment, already in France with other regiments of Negro troopers of
the national guard, were thrown across No Man's Land on a cold and foggy