For every social ill the panacea of Wealth
has been urged,--wealth to overthrow the remains of the
slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate;
wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth
to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics,
and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead
of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the
Public School.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies,
but it is threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond
that world,--the Black World beyond the Veil. Today it
makes little difference to Atlanta, to the South, what the
Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land
he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of,
half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will
and do for himself,--and let no man dream that day will
never come,--then the part he plays will not be one of
sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught
to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his
striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white
world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are
smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of
serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through
all, the Veil of Race.
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