ould not articulate the
message of another people.

This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled
ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of
eight thousand thousand people, has sent them often wooing false gods
and invoking false means of salvation, and has even at times seemed
destined to make them ashamed of themselves. In the days of bondage
they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and
disappointment; eighteenth-century Rousseauism never worshiped freedom
with half the unquestioning faith that the American Negro did for two
centuries. To him slavery was, indeed, the sum of all villainies, the
cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; emancipation was the key
to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the
eyes of wearied Israelites. In his songs and exhortations swelled
one refrain, liberty; in his tears and curses the god he implored had
freedom in his right hand. At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like
a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in
his own plaintive cadences:--

"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
The Lord has bought your liberty!"

Years have passed away, ten, twenty, thirty. Thirty years of national
life, thirty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy ghost
of Banquo sits in its old place at the national feast. In vain does the
nation cry to its vastest problem,--

"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!"

The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of
lesser good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep
disappointment rests upon the Negro people,--a disappointment all the
more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the
simple ignorance of a lowly folk.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boom that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,--like
a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Kuklux Klan, the lies of
carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory
advice of friends and foes left the bewildered serf with no new
watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the decade closed, however,
he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its
attainment powerful means, and these the F