Page:The New Negro.pdf/315

Rh to have their vista of the past shut in by whitewashed wall, mud chimney and whipping ring of a slave street. No wonder in his new racial consciousness, the Negro digs up his past and searches out in Africa the genesis of a proud tradition. My thought is that the new opportunities he is broaching in Ameri- can life and labor throw open another vista of the past, one of the New World, to which he is not alien. This background may not be his to-day, I grant; but by some compensating law of relativity, it will come to meet him as he presses forward.

Seldom in the history of the world have a people moved North. Our history is of Westward expansion. So coursed the great racial waves that swept into Europe from the East. We have had the experiment of peoples moving Southward-Northmen and Frank and the rest, flowering out in a new and milder climate. Here we are witnessing a reversal of that process. What its outcome will be cannot be forecast. But it is something which, points of compass aside, is kin to the whole trend of American experience. It is search for the new and democratic chance. It is pioneering.

It is, also, an adventure in self-expression—not alone in political and economic terms, but in things of the word and spirit. We have witnessed in the United States the duress in which various immigrant groups have been held until their cause was taken up by rare people, as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis, endowed not alone with understanding, but with the art of interpretation. The Negro has had no language barrier; but he has been hemmed in by barbed wire entanglements of prejudice and fixed conceptions. He is learning ways of his own to surmount them. He employs winged gifts that shoot across them. He brings song, music, dance, poetry, story-telling; rhythms and color and drama, ardent feeling and fleet thought. Not alone is his a Northward migration within the confines of America, challenging new communities with his presence. Not alone is it a shift from soil to city. Not alone a breaking-away from the old inhibitions of a fixed and often adverse social environment. He is readdressing himself to America on a cultural plane; and in arenas where the old inhibitions do not hold. A verse that pierces the heart meets