The Souls of Black Folk | Page 7

by force or
fraud,--and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil
came something of good, --the more careful adjustment of education to
real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities,
and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world- sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The

bright ideals of the past,--physical freedom, political power, the
training of brains and the training of hands,--all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they
all wrong,--all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and
incomplete,--the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond
imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want
to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted
and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more
than ever,--the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The
power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,--else what shall save
us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,--all these we need,
not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and
aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before
the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the
unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits
and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other
races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the
American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly
lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed:
there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the
Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no
true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave;
the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in
all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a
dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she
replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but
determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving
jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow
Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic
is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons
is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of

their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the
name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human
opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on
coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and
deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black
folk.

II
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger; History's lessons but record One
death-grapple in the darkness 'Twixt old systems and the Word; Truth
forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold
sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within
the shadow Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia
and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this
problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who
marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical
points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless
knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real
cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever
forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had
Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly
guised, sprang from the earth,--What shall be done with Negroes?
Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the
query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and
intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the