Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals are being
trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf
to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of
prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength
and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma. Con-
scious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes
bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is
a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer
rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind,
shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very
strength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses,
and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considera-
tions in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man's
strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one
lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type
of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the
other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before
force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps
impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more
than meat and the body more than raiment.
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