The Souls of Black Folk | Page 5

his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have
in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow
of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy
and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black
men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the
world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few
days since Emanci- pation, the black man's turning hither and thither in
hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose
effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it
is not weakness,--it is the contradiction of double aims. The
double-aimed struggle of the black artisan--on the one hand to escape
white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of

water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a
poverty-stricken horde-- could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice- told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own
flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the
ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion
and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten
thousand thousand people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and
invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about
to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever
worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the
American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and
dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all
sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a
promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of
wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain--Liberty;
in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right
hand. At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild
carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive
cadences:--
"Shout, O children! Shout, you're free! For God has bought your
liberty!"
Years have passed away since then,--ten, twenty, forty; forty years of

national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain
do we cry to this our vastest social problem:--
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have
come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment
rests upon the Negro people,--a disappointment all the more bitter
because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple
ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,--like a
tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of
carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory
advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new
watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however,
he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its
attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave
him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of
freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting
the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not?
Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that
had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to
vote themselves