s
of high descent brings burning desire to spread the gift abroad,--the
obligation of nobility to the ignoble. Such sense of duty assumes two
things: a real possession of the heritage and its frank appreciation by
the humble-born. So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with
thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites,
there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black
man begins to dispute the white man's title to certain alleged bequests
of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when
his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity;
when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste,--then
the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believe
that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants
to fight America.

After this the descent to Hell is easy. On the pale, white faces which
the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often
and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate
hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions. Down through the
green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I
have seen a man--an educated gentleman--grow livid with anger because a
little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car. He
was a white man. I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child,
who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother:
"Here, you damned black--" He was white. In Central Park I have seen the
upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of rage
because black folk rode by in a motor car. He was a white man. We have
seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable
lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing;
torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be
of the same color as the mob's innocent victims and because that color
was not white! We have seen,--Merciful God! in these wild days and in
the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood,--what have we not
seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder
done to men and women of Negro descent.

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass
of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that
today to the millions of my people no misfortune could h