Abstract:
At the dawn of the twentieth century, men of light and leading both in Europe and in America had not yet made up their minds as to what place to assign to the spiritual aspirations of the black man; and the Nations were casting about for an answer to the wail which went up from the heart of the oppressed race for opportunity. And yet it was at best but an impotent cry. For there has never lived a people worth writing about who have not shaped out a destiny for themselves, or carved out their own opportunity. Before this time, however, it had been discovered that the black man was not necessarily the missing link between man and ape. It had even been granted that for intellectual endowments he -had nothing to be ashamed of in an open competition with the Aryan or any other type. Here was a being anatomically perfect, adaptive and adaptable to any and every sphere of the struggle. For life. Sociologically, he had succeeded in recording upon the pages of contemporary history a conception of family life unknown to Western ideas. Moreover, he was the scion of a spiritual sphere peculiar unto himself; for when Western Nations would have exhausted their energy in the vain struggle for the things which satisfy not, it was felt that it would be to these people to whom the world would turn for inspiration, seeing that in them only would be found those elements which make for pure altruism, the leaven of all human experience. Again, the art of the caricaturist had by now been played out, it was no longer possible, as far as this race was. Concerned, to depict the Sultan of Zanzibar, for example, other than as an Ethiopia