these minds at which you are aiming remain unaffected? What do you propose to do to secure life and liberty for the Negro if the white Southerner persists, as he has persisted for sixty years, in refusing to grant guarantees of life and liberty?” The N.A.A.C.P. has done some good and worth-while work as an organization of protest. But the times call for something more effective than protests addressed to the other fellow’s consciousness. What is needed at present is more of the mobilizing of the Negro’s political power, pocketbook power and intellectual power (which are absolutely within the Negro’s own control) to do for the Negro the things which the Negro needs to have done without depending upon or waiting for the co-operative action of white people. This co-operative action, whenever it does come, is a boon that no Negro, intelligent or unintelligent, affects to despise. But no Negro of clear vision, whether he be a leader or not, can afford to predicate the progress of the Negro upon such co-operative action, because it may not come. Mr. Shillady may have seen these things. It is high time that all Negroes see these things whether their white professional friends see them or not. —July, 1920. Our White Friends In the good old days when the black man’s highest value in the white man’s eye was that of an object of benevolence especially provided by the Divine mind for calling out those tender out-pourings of charity which were so dear to the self-satisfied Caucasian—in those days the white men who fraternized with black people could do so as their guides, philosophers and friends without incurring any hostility on the part of black folk. Today, however, the white man who mixes with the black brother is having a hard time of it. Somehow Ham’s offspring no longer feels proud of being “taken up” by the progeny of Japhet. And when the white man insists on mixing in with him the colored brother will persist in attributing ulterior motives. What is the cause of this difference? The answer will be found only by one who refuses to wear the parochial blinkers of Anglo-Saxon civilization and sees that the relations of the white and black race have changed and are changing all over the world. Such an observer would note that the most significant fact of the growing race consciousness is to be found in the inevitable second half of the word. It isn’t because these darker people are motivated by race that their present state of mind constitutes a danger to Caucasian overlordship. It is because they have developed consciousness, intelligence, understanding.
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