make the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United States
protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are
silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared
with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short,
what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could America
condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her
own borders?

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal
imprisons and lowers. Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: "Honesty is
best, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by." Say
this and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. But
say to a people: "The one virtue is to be white," and the people rush to
the inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!"

Is not this the record of present America? Is not this its headlong
progress? Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the
statement "I am white," the one fundamental tenet of our practical
morality? Only when this basic, iron rule is involved is our defense of
right nation-wide and prompt. Murder may swagger, theft may rule and
prostitution may flourish and the nation gives but spasmodic,
intermittent and lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black or
the thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood,
and the righteousness of the indignation sweeps the world. Nor would
this fact make the indignation less justifiable did not we all know that
it was blackness that was condemned and not crime.

In the awful cataclysm of World War, where from beating, slandering, and
murdering us the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each
other, we of the Darker Peoples looked on in mild amaze.