at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it
changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning
self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre
forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he
saw himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in
himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He
began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the
world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time
he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a
half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a
cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had
entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of
dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of
his ignorance,--not simply of letters, but of life, of business,
of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and
feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red
stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal
defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race,
meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also
the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white
adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro
home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race
with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and
thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists
gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul