Is this right? Is it rational? Is it good policy? Have we
in America a distinct mission as a race–a distinct sphere of
action and an opportunity for race development, or is self-
obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire?

If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we
find it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between
different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in
feeling, in ideals of two different races; if, now, this
difference exists touching territory, laws, language, or even
religion, it is manifest that these people cannot live in the
same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other
hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and
religion; if there is a satisfactory adjustment of economic
life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on
the same street, two or three great national ideals might not
thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive
together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better,
than in isolation. Here, it seems to me, is the reading of the
riddle that puzzles so many of us. We are Americans, not only by
birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our
language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does
not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast
historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but
half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland. We
are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that
black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of
the Teutonic to-day. We are that people whose subtle sense of
song has given America its only American music, its only
American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid