place. New ideals of life are expressed in recent Negro literature and
slowly and imperceptibly those ideas are becoming institutionalized
in the Negro church and more particularly in the cultural ideals of
the Negro school. But this makes another chapter in the history of
Negro culture in America.

I have sought in this brief sketch to indicate the modifications,
changes and fortune which a distinctive racial temperament has
undergone as a result of encounters with an alien life and culture.
This temperament, as I conceive it, consists in a few elementary but
distinctive characteristics, determined by physical organization and
transmitted biologically. These characteristics manifest themselves in
a genial, sunny and social disposition, in an interest and attachment
to external, physical things rather than to subjective states and
objects of introspection; in a disposition for expression rather than
enterprise and action. The changes which have taken place in the
manifestations of this temperament have been actuated by an inherent
and natural impulse, characteristic of all living things, to persist
and maintain themselves in a changed environment. Such changes have
occurred as are likely to take place in any organism in its struggle
to live and to use its environment to further and complete its own
existence.

The general principle which the Negro material illustrates is that the
racial temperament selects out of the masses of cultural materials, to
which it had access, such technical, mechanical and intellectual
devices as meet its needs at a particular period of its existence. It
clothes and enriches itself with such new customs, habits, and
cultural forms as it is able, or permitted to use. It puts into these
relatively external things, moreover, such concrete meanings as its
changing experience and its unchanging racial individuality demand.

Everywhere and always the Negro has been interested rather in
expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in
its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural
disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor
a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and
frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving
life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action.
The Negro is, so to speak, the lady among the races.

In reviewing the fortunes of the Negro's temperament as it is