In song and exhortation swelled one refrain--Liberty; in his
tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his
right hand. At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like a dream.
With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message
in his own plaintive cadences:--
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then,--ten, twenty, forty;
forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and
development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed
seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest
social problem:--
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman
has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of
good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of
a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,--a
disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained
ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain
search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude
their grasp,--like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening
and misleading the headless host.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30