usands of Negroes have been placed
in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally
organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies
working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro
population, especially of the National League for the Protection
of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial
Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been
organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be
greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about
by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene
Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its
work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern
college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years
after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships
for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the
Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar
fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was
interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress
and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of
tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces
were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and
violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to
the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEGRO IN THE NEW AGE

1. _Character of the Period_

The decade 1910-1920, momentous in the history of the world, in the
history of the Negro race in America must finally be regarded as the
period of a great spiritual uprising against the proscription, the
defamation, and the violence of the preceding twenty years. As never
before the Negro began to realize that the ultimate burden of his
salvation rested upon himself, and he learned to respect and to depend
upon himself accordingly.

The decade naturally divides into two parts, that before and that after
the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Even in the earlier years,
however, the tendencies that later were dominant were beginning to be
manifest. The greater part of the ten years was consumed by the t