g, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not
in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the
soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life,
with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must
give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to
pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.

In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and
is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights
and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith.
On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man's strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands
almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a
traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets
that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after
all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into
black,--the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in
the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise.
It is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the
old-time Negro,--the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for
the earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his
laziness and lack of ma