e: the
Northern Negro's right to protest against the wrongs heaped upon him is
less restricted, and, his means of protection and defense are more
numerous in the North than in the South. Already in at least one State
north of Mason and Dixon's line Herculean efforts are being put forth to
disfranchise the colored man by constitutional enactment; the
discrimination against a man on account of his color, and the lynching
of Negroes and the burning of their houses by infuriated mobs of white
men, are not unheard of things in the North and West. Most of the
labor-unions of these sections are still closed to the brother in black,
and most white working-men in the Northern and Western States are
determined that the Negro shall not earn a living in any respectable
calling if they can prevent it. Many of the newspapers North and West
(and a few right here in New York City) often use their columns to
misrepresent and slander the colored man, and it was only last week when
one of the highest courts in the Empire State rendered a decision in
which it justified discrimination against a man on the grounds of his
color and his condition of servitude. Verily, the Negro problem is not a
Southern, but a national problem!

* * * * *

Many solutions for the Negro problem have been proposed, but to our mind
there is one and only one practical and effective answer to the
question. In the first place we claim that the early friends of the
Negro grasped the true solution, which is that his needs and
possibilities are the same as those of the other members of the human
family; that he must be educated not only for industrial efficiency and
for private gain, but to share in the duties and responsibilities of a
free democracy; that he must have equality of rights, for his own sake,
for the sake of the human race, and for the perpetuity of free
institutions. America will not have learned the full lesson of her
system of human slavery until she realizes that a rigid caste system is
inimical to the progress of the human race and to the perpetuity of
democratic government.

In the second place, the Negro must make common cause with the working
class which to-day is organizing and struggling for better social and
economic conditions. The old slave oligarchy maintained its ascendency
largely by fixing a gulf between the Negro slave and the white free
laborer, and the jealousies and animosities of the slave period have
survived to keep apart the Ne