he key to knowledge
can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning
and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so
largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such
waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with
civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and
skill, unless skillfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more
and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present,
until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found
energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the
moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against
them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask,
Who brought us? When you shriek, Deliver us from the vision of
intermarriage, they answer, that legal marriage is infinitely better
than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you
accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as
just may wail: the rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless
black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads
of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And
finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar
trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and
lawlessness its twin abortion; that color and race are not crimes, and
yet they it is which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation,
North, East, South, and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified--I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine
millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the
cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the
guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future is how
best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past
and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energ