When Africa awakes / The "inside story" of the stirrings and strivings of the new Negro in the Western world

By HUBERT H. HARRISON, D.S.C.
Author of “The Negro and the Nation,” “Lincoln and Liberty,” and Associate Editor of the Negro World
COPYRIGHTED
By HUBERT H. HARRISON, 1920.
PUBLISHED BY
THE PORRO PRESS
513 Lenox Avenue
NEW YORK CITY
1920
THIS LITTLE RECORD IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO STOOD BY MY SIDE IN LOVE, LABOR AND SACRIFICE WHEN THE FOUNDATIONS WERE LAID
The Great War of 1914–1918 has served to liberate many new ideas undreamt of by those who rushed humanity into that bath of blood. During that war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world; mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims. Even the dullest can now see that those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending either the limits or the applications of “democracy.” Ireland and India, Egypt and Russia are still the Ithuriel’s spear of the great democratic pretence. The flamboyant advertising of “democracy” has returned to plague the inventors; for the subject populations who contributed their millions in men and billions in treasure for the realization of the ideal which was flaunted before their eyes are now clamoring for their share of it. They are demanding that those who advertised democracy shall now make good. This is the main root of that great unrest which is now troubling the decrepit statesmanship of Europe and America. But the rigid lines of the old regime will not permit the granting of these new demands. Hence the new war against democracy which expresses itself in the clever but futile attempt to outlaw the demands for fuller freedom as “sedition” and “Bolshevism.”
The most serious aspect of this new situation is the racial one. The white world has been playing with the catch-words of democracy while ruthlessly ruling an overwhelming majority of black, brown and yellow peoples to whom these catchwords were never intended to apply. But these many-colored millions have taken part in the war “to make the world safe for democracy,” and they are now insisting that democracy shall be made safe for them. This, in plain English, their white overlords do not intend to concede. “The undictated development of all peoples” was, at best, intended “for white people only.” Thus, white civilization is brought face to face with a crisis out of which may easily grow military conflicts of tremendous scope and, more remotely, the passing of international control out of the hands of a few white nations.