The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

THE GIFT of BLACK FOLK
The Negroes in the Making of America
by W. E. Burghardt DuBois Ph. D. (Harv.)
Author of “The Souls of Black Folk,” “Darkwater,” etc. Editor of The Crisis
Introduction by EDWARD F. McSWEENEY, LL. D.
1924 THE STRATFORD CO., Publishers Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright, 1924 By THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS
Printed in the United States of America

It is not uncommon for casual thinkers to assume that the United States of America is practically a continuation of English nationality. Our speech is English and the English played so large a part in our beginnings that it is easy to fall more or less consciously into the thought that the history of this nation has been but a continuation and development of these beginnings. A little reflection, however, quickly convinces us that at least there was present French influence in the Mississippi Valley and Spanish influence in the southeast and southwest. Everything else however that has been added to the American nationality is often looked upon as a sort of dilution of more or less doubtful value: peoples that had to be assimilated as far as possible and made over to the original and basic type. Thus we continually speak of Germans and Scandinavians, of Irish and Jews, Poles, Austrians and Hungarians; and, with few exceptions, we regard the coming of the Negroes as an unmitigated error and a national liability.
It is high time that this course of our thinking should be changed. America is conglomerate. This is at once her problem and her glory—perhaps indeed her sole and greatest reason for being. Her physical foundation is not English and while it is primarily it is not entirely European. It represents peculiarly a coming together of the peoples of the world. American institutions have been borrowed from England and France in the main, but with contributions from many and widely scattered groups. American history has no prototype and has been developed from the various racial elements. Despite the fact that our mother tongue is called English we have developed an American speech with its idiosyncrasies and idioms, a speech whose purity is not to be measured by its conformity to the speech of the British Isles. And finally the American spirit is a new and interesting result of divers threads of thought and feeling coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa.