its mad money-getting plutocracy. As such, it is our duty to
conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our
spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization,
by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that
broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but
sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of
development.

For the accomplishment of these ends we need race
organizations: Negro colleges, Negro newspapers, Negro business
organizations, a Negro school of literature and art, and an
intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the Negro
mind, which we may call a Negro Academy. Not only is all this
necessary for positive advance, it is absolutely imperative for
negative defense. Let us not deceive ourselves at our situation
in this country. Weighted with a heritage of moral iniquity from
our past history, hard pressed in the economic world by foreign
immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and
pitied everywhere; our one haven of refuge is ourselves, and but
one means of advance, our own belief in our great destiny, our
own implicit trust in our ability and worth. There is no power
under God's high heaven that can stop the advance of eight
thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people.
But–and here is the rub–they MUST be honest, fearlessly
criticising their own faults, zealously correcting them; they
must be EARNEST. No people that laughs at itself, and ridicules
itself, and wishes to God it was anything but itself ever wrote
its name in history; it MUST be inspired with the Divine faith
of our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle
will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar