head or not, the new Negro in America will never amount to anything politically until he enfranchises himself from the Grand Old Party which has made a political joke of him. —July, 1920.

The first part of this editorial is reprinted from an article written in 1912.↩︎

The first part of this editorial is reprinted from an article written in 1912.↩︎

CHAPTER V.THE PROBLEMS OF LEADERSHIP.

[In all the tangles of our awakening race consciousness there are perhaps none more knotty than the tangles relating to leadership. Leadership among Negro Americans, as among other people, means the direction of a group’s activities, whether by precept, example or compulsion. But, in our case, there is involved a strikingly new element. Should the leading of our group in any sense be the product of our group’s consciousness or of a consciousness originating from outside that group? What the new Negro thinks on the problem of “outside interference” in the leadership of his group is expressed in the first and sixth editorials of this chapter, one of which appeared in The Voice and the other in The Negro World.

“A Tender Point” formulates one part of the problem of leadership which is seldom touched upon by Negro Americans who characteristically avoid any public presentation of a thing about which they will talk interminably in private; namely, the claim advanced, explicitly and implicitly, by Negroids of mixed blood to be considered the natural leaders of Negro activities on the ground of some alleged “superiority” inherent in their white blood.

“The Descent of Du Bois” was written at the request of Major Loving of the Intelligence Department of the Army at the time when Dr. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis, was being preened for a desk captaincy at Washington. Major Loving solicited a summary of the situation from me as one of those “radicals” qualified to furnish such a summary. This he incorporated in his report to his superiors in Washington, and this I published a week later in The Voice of July 25, 1918, as an editorial without changing a single word. I was informed by Major Loving that this editorial was one of the main causes of the government’s change of intention as regards the Du Bois captaincy. Since that time Dr. Du Bois’s white friends have been fervidly ignoring the occurrence and the consequent collapse of his leadership. “When the Blind Lead” was written as a reminder to the souls of black folks that “while it is as easy as eggs for a leader to fall off the fence, it is 

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