The American Negro Academy believes that upon those of the race who havehad the advantages of higher education and culture, rests theresponsibility of taking concerted steps for the employment of theseagencies to uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action.
Two great obstacles to this consummation are apparent: (a) The lack ofunity, want of harmony, absence of a self-sacrificing spirit, and nowell-defined line of policy seeking definite aims; and (b) Thepersistent, relentless, at times covert opposition employed to thwartthe Negro at every step of his upward struggles to establish thejustness of his claim to the highest physical, intellectual and moralpossibilities.
The Academy will, therefore, from time to time, publish such papers asin their judgment aid, by their broad and scholarly treatment of thetopics discussed the dissemination of principles tending to the growthand development of the Negro along right lines, and the vindication ofthat race against vicious assaults.
The American Negro has always felt an intense personal interest indiscussions as to the origins and destinies of races: primarily becauseback of most discussions of race with which he is familiar, have lurkedcertain assumptions as to his natural abilities, as to his political,intellectual and moral status, which he felt were wrong. He has,consequently, been led to deprecate and minimize race distinctions, tobelieve intensely that out of one blood God created all nations, and tospeak of human brotherhood as though it were the possibility of analready dawning to-morrow.
Nevertheless, in our calmer moments we must acknowledge that humanbeings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extremetypes of the world’s races have met, and the resulting problem as to thefuture relations of these types is not only of intense and livinginterest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind.
It is necessary, therefore, in planning our movements, in guiding ourfuture development, that at times we rise above the pressing, butsmaller questions of separate schools and cars, wage-discrimination andlynch law, to survey the whole question of race in human philosophy andto lay, on a basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those largelines of policy and higher ideals which may form our guiding lines andboundaries in the practical difficulties of every day. For it is certainthat all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural law,and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest, which isagainst the constitution of the world, is vain. The question, then,which we must seriously consider is this: What is the real meaning ofRace; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and whatlessons has the past history of race development to teach the risingNegro people?
[Pg 6]When we thus come to inquire into the essential difference of races wefind it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion. Many