This is personal. I would call it a “document” except that the word has overtones of something official, vested and final. But I have been clothed with no authority to speak for others, and what I have to say can be final only for myself. I hasten to say this at the start, for I remember my anger at the effrontery of one who a few years ago undertook to speak for me and twelve million others. I concurred with practically nothing he said. This was not important in itself, but when one presumes to speak for me he must reflect my mind so accurately that I find no source of disagreement with him. To do this, he must be either a lack-brain parrot or a god. Though there are many lack-brains, historic and present circumstances prove that there are no gods dealing with the problem of race—or, as dangerous to the American ideal and as exhausting to individual Americans as it has been for three hundred years, it would have been settled long ago. Else the gods are singularly perverse.

There have been opportunities for complaisant gods. Every crisis has brought an opportunity. In Revolutionary times, even before we were a nation and the social structure and the ways of thinking that went with nationhood had solidified, there was splendid scope. But no gods arrived. Again, in the awful pause following the Civil War, when the social structure of half the country had disintegrated and men prayed only to be told what to think and do, no god answered. Instead, the ready devils of positive unreason took over and ruled for a long time. The First World War and the Second held the potential too, but we common men and the leaders we looked to were content with strong indictments and feeble measures. There was a hell-reek of baleful prophecy:

“A small group of Negro agitators and another small group of white rabble-rousers are pushing this country closer and closer to an interracial explosion which may make the race riots of the First World War and its aftermath seem mild by comparison.... Unless saner counsels prevail we may have the worst internal clashes since Reconstruction, with hundreds, if not thousands, killed and amicable race relations set back for decades.”^[1]

With such dire forebodings screaming in our ears, we fell back on a peculiar (and American) misinterpretation of Hegelian philosophy—that time, the flow of history, inevitably brings changes for the better.