ro is ever to be a factor in the world's history--if among the
gaily-colored banners that deck the broad ramparts of civilization is to
hang one uncompromising black, then it must be placed there by black
hands, fashioned by black heads and hallowed by the travail of
200,000,000 black hearts beating in one glad song of jubilee.

For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people--the 8,000,000
people of Negro blood in the United States of America--must soon come to
realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of
Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is _not_ absorption by the white
Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in
the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving
individual men like Toussaint, the Saviour, but are a nation stored with
wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile
imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall
unswervingly follow Negro ideals.

It may, however, be objected here that the situation of our race in
America renders this attitude impossible; that our sole hope of
salvation lies in our being able to lose our race identity in the
commingled blood of the nation; and that any other course would merely
increase the friction of races which we call race prejudice, and against
which we have so long and so earnestly fought.

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro
who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America
has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads;
has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an
American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be
a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro,
am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black
and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction
of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place
upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or
Irish or Italian blood would?

It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises
from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and
contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled,
race responsibility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best
blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro