was a white man. I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child,
who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother:
"Here, you damned black--" He was white. In Central Park I have seen the
upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of rage
because black folk rode by in a motor car. He was a white man. We have
seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable
lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing;
torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be
of the same color as the mob's innocent victims and because that color
was not white! We have seen,--Merciful God! in these wild days and in
the name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood,--what have we not
seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder
done to men and women of Negro descent.

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass
of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that
today to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen,--of death
and pestilence, failure and defeat--that would not make the hearts of
millions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy! Do you doubt
it? Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were to
report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.

Unfortunate? Unfortunate. But where is the misfortune? Mine? Am I, in my
blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow, above the
suffering, above the shackled anger that beats the bars, above the hurt
that crazes there surges in me a vast pity,--pity for a people
imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause,
for such a phantasy!

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to