Against this
surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and "dago" her
social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take
her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of
Europe. She trains her immigrants to this despising of "niggers" from
the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the
submerged classes in the fatherlands.

* * * * *

All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven
seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath
the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are
breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I
will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was
must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again
today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.

If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain,
because it is but a cry,--a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?

Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful
dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang
bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his
mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good,
O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors,
for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals
if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!"

_The Riddle of the Sphinx_

Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea!
Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free!
The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep,
Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep.

The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky,
And not from the East and not from the West knelled that
soul-waking cry,
But out of the South,--the sad, black South--it screamed from
the top of the sky,
Crying: "Awake, O ancient race!" Wailing, "O woman, arise!"
And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the
midnight cries,--
But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world
stifled her sighs.

The white world's vermin and filth:
All the dirt of London,
All the scum of New York;