ill lead in the future.

* * * * *

Remembering the multitude of the Croix de Guerre and citations on the
breasts of the returning Negro officers and the Distinguished Service
Crosses to boot, the Negro officer is smiling, not discouraged with
himself and is still carrying on for the flag, the country where he was
born and where the bones of his fathers are buried, and for the uplift
and leadership of his people for a more glorious Americanism.

History tells us that on the continent of America that Toussaint
L'Ouverture, who with a leadership that no man ever surpassed and who
routed the best troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, was a pure Negro and a
slave until after fifty years old.

Major Martin R. Delaney was a pure Negro, and many others that can be
mentioned were pure Negroes.

Ex-parte judgments will not go in the future history, for the black man
will not only act his history but he will write it, and be it said that
he knows history methods, and that with him they are not those which
come from the heat of prejudice and a direct and concerted attempt to
discredit any group of American people.

Unpatriotic and unwarranted statements do no good and lull the country
to sleep, and throw it off its guard while the effects of these
statements are causing just rankling in the breasts of the Negro people
who have had a New Vision.

The Negro officers know the psychology of their own race and also of the
white race; but it is to be feared the latter will never know the mind
and motive forces of the Negro, if he imagines that his group has not
had a new birth in America, whose language it speaks, whose thought it
thinks for its own betterment, and whose ideals, both social, political,
and economic it emulates.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE NEW NEGRO AND THE NEW AMERICA

"THE OLD ORDER
Changeth, yielding place to new."
THROUGH THE
Arbitrament of war, behold a new and better America!
a new and girded Negro!
"The watches
Of the night have PASSED!
"The watches
Of the day BEGIN!"

Out of war's crucible new nations emerge. New ideas seize mankind and if
the conflict has been a just one, waged for exalted ideals and
imperishable principles and not alone for mere national security and
integrity, a new character, a broader national vision is formed.

Such was the result of the early wars for democracy. The seeds of