history so indelibly as to withstand and
endure the test of time.

Your education, your observation, your occupation, have brought you into
close touch and into personal and vital relations with the fundamental
problems of life. We may call it the truth problem, the labor problem,
the Indian problem, or perhaps the Negro problem. I like to call it the
"Human Race Problem."

The dawn of history breaks upon a world at strife, a universal conflict
of man at war with his brother. The very face of the earth has been dyed
in blood and its surface whitened with human bones in an endeavor to
establish a harmonious and helpful adjustment between man and man. There
can be no interest more fundamental or of greater concern to the human
family than the proper adjustment of man's relations to his brother.

You and I belong to an undeveloped, backward race that is rarely for its
own sake taken into account in the adjustment of man's relation to man,
but is considered largely with reference to the impression which it
makes upon the dominant Anglo-Saxon. The Negro's very existence is
itself somewhat satellitious, and secondary only, to the great white orb
around which he revolves. If by chance any light does appear in the
black man's sphere of operations, it is usually assumed that it is
reflected from his association with his white brother. The black is
generally projected against the white and usually to the disadvantage
and embarrassment of the former. It becomes very easy, therefore, to see
in our minds and hearts what is so apparent in our faces, "Darkness
there and nothing more."

But you must keep in mind that the Negro is a tenth part of a great
cosmopolitan commonwealth; he is a part of a nation to which God has
given many very intricate problems to work out. Who knows but that this
nation is God's great laboratory which is being used by the Creator to
show the rest of the world, what it does not seem thoroughly to
understand, that it is possible for all God's people, even the two most
extreme types, the black and the white, to live together harmoniously
and helpfully?

The question that the American nation must face, and which the Negro as
a part of the nation should soberly and dispassionately consider, is the
mutual, social, civic, and industrial adjustment upon common ground of
two races, differing widely in characteristics and diverse in physical
peculiarities, but alike suspicious and alike jealous, and alike more o