estate or industrial skill." What seemed the common sense and the sweet reasonableness of this program at once commanded attention; and the South, in the first flush of a new era of industrial development, and the North, perfectly ready to accept any program that promised to make Southern investments secure, both approved the new [30]leader, who along the lines of thrift and self-reliance certainly gave tremendous inspiration to thousands of his brother-laborers in the South.

[30]

From the very first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men that honestly questioned the wisdom of the platform offered by Mr. Washington. They felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept segregation and to waive political rights he had given up altogether too much. As the opposition, however, they were not at first unitedly constructive, and in their utterance they sometimes offended by harshness of tone. Some years ago they were sneered at as the "intellectuals," "the idealists," etc. It is significant that to-day the sneers are few, and that a constructive program has more and more commanded attention. The recognized leader who has risen from the group is W.E. Burghardt DuBois, editor of the Crisis, the voice of an organization formed in 1910 and known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This organization frankly "proposes to make 11,000,000 Americans physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free from disfranchisement, and socially free from insult." To this end it is [31]waging a fight for justice in every way, whether at the polls, in the courts, in public conveyances, in schools, in chances for earning a living, and it has widened the door of hope not only for the college man or woman, but for the agricultural laborer as well.

[31]

Let it not be forgotten that even in the first of these two large programs there was much that was admirable. Its virtues, however, fell distinctly short of the second. A man might have ten thousand dollars in his pocket; but if he was in a strange town and legally denied a bed late at night, or if he could not buy a meal in a restaurant when he was hungry, he would learn that there are some things in the world greater than money; and to-day more than ever we might assert that anything other than the fullest emphasis on the ordinary rights of citizenship is out of harmony with the principles of American democracy.

In this rapid review we have of course touched only lightly upon some matters of the highest 

 Prev. P 19/59 next