people cannot be
marshalled to do the bidding of the race. They stand back to make room
for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry
under the veil of race pride.

Is this right? Is it rational? Is it good policy? Have we in America a
distinct mission as a race--a distinct sphere of action and an
opportunity for race development, or is self-obliteration the highest
end to which Negro blood dare aspire?

If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find it,
historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of
people; it is the difference in aim, in feeling, in ideals of two
different races; if, now, this difference exists touching territory,
laws, language, or even religion, it is manifest that these people
cannot live in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on
the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and
religion; if there is a satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then
there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two
or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of
different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well,
perhaps even better, than in isolation. Here, it seems to me, is the
reading of the riddle that puzzles so many of us. We are Americans, not
only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our
language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go.
At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from
the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark
forests of its African fatherland. We are the first fruits of this new
nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to
soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day. We are that people whose
subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only
American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad
money-getting plutocracy. As such, it is our duty to conserve our
physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a
race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race
unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely
recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in
their opportunities of development.

For the accomplishment of these ends we need race organizations: Negro
colleges, Negro newspapers, N