Page:The New Negro.pdf/471

Rh great human force, spread out as it is in all lands and languages, the world must one day reckon. We face, then, in the modern black American, the black West Indian, the black Frenchman, the black Portuguese, the black Spaniard and the black African a man gaining in knowledge and power and in the definite aim to end color slavery and give black folk a knowledge of modern culture.

There are those who see in the movement only danger—only the silly agitation of would-be fomenters of trouble. They discount it, laugh at it and secretly and openly obstruct it. When the Pan-African Congress planned to meet in Brussels all the industrial exploiters of the Belgian Congo united to misrepresent its objects, distort its actions and punish its local supporters. When the same Congress met in France strong pressure was exerted to keep it from any interference with the investments of French capital in Africa. When the Congress met in England it was dubbed “French" in sympathy and anarchistic in tendency. And yet slowly but surely the movement grows and the day faintly dawns when the new force for international understanding and racial readjustment will and must be felt.

To some persons—to more human beings than ever before at one time in the world's history, there came during the Great War, during those terrible years of 1917 and 1918, a vision of the Glory of Sacrifice, a dream of a world greater, sweeter, more beautiful and more honest than ever before; a world without war, without poverty and without hate.

I am glad it came. Even though it was a mirage it was eternally true. To-day some faint shadow of it comes to me again.

My ship seeks Africa. Ten days we crept across the Atlantic; five days we sail to the Canaries. And then turning we sought the curve of that mighty and fateful shoulder of gigantic Africa. Slowly, slowly we creep down the coast in a little German cargo boat. Yonder behind the horizon is Cape Bojador whence in 1441 came the brown Moors and black Moors who through the slave trade built America and