-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