mself,
and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he
bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially
masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without
a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered
into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man
is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom
of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,--not simply of
letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated
sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his
hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red
stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement
of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of
ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of
filth from white whoremongers and adulterers, threatening almost the
obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and
his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is
darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice,
and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against
barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the
"higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and
swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just
homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress he humbly
bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice
that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh
speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule
and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license
of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and boisterous welcoming of
the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything
black, from Toussaint to the devil,--before this there rises a sickening
despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host
to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

They still press on, they still nurse the dogged hope,--not a hope
of nauseating patronage, not a hope of reception into