Progress and Achievements of the Colored People / Containing the Story of the Wonderful Advancement of the Colored Americans—the Most Marvelous in the History of Nations—Their Past Accomplishments, Together With Their Present-day Opportunities and a Glimpse Into the Future for Further Developments—the Dawn of a Triumphant Era. A Handbook for Self-improvement Which Leads to Greater Success

by Kelly Miller; Joseph R. Gay

The Assyrians, the Persians, the mighty mistress of the world, the Roman Empire, vanished like a breath when they presumed to stand in the way of the designs of the Almighty.

All were pawns upon the chessboard of time, so to speak, the very foundation of which is soul, that attempted to wrest the fiat from its meaning by the adoption of brute or national force.

They served the purpose of carrying man toward a certain goal on the way to his final pinnacle, then claimed the results of the uplift, and went down through vanity and presumption.

Japan with its physical impress persisted in, will go down like the rest. It must go down because it does not represent any factor in the Divine designs. But it is an illustration of what education will accomplish, and its fate will illustrate what human nature, obsessed by its own reliance upon force, will reach in the end.

Our Colored Americans have no such incentive as force or physical designs. The conquerors of the earth were compelled to yield to the educational programme to uplift the soul of man, not his material prospects, except so far as they advanced the psychological, and they may be said to be now in that psychological phase of the movement of the nations of the earth, which leads to the highest point of intensive civilization.

A GREAT DIVISION OF THE HUMAN FAMILY

It should be constantly borne in mind, that the Ethiopians and their descendants, the Colored Americans in the United States, represent a great division of the human family, which, with the others, are alone to be considered in the great design of unification.

The Roman Empire represented no such portion of the human family. Assyria, Persia, Egypt, and the dominating historical peoples were all mixed, and when their uses had culminated, that is, when there was no more use for them, or when they ventured to assume superiority over the rest of the earth, they were submerged.

Of the mighty races that constituted the primitive divisions of man, there are now remaining, with each bearing a sharp line of distinction between them, the Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, and Ethiopian. Into these four divisions all the nations and peoples of the earth may be resolved.

It may be said that the Aryan consists of the white race; the Ethiopian, or Hamitic of the dark race; the Semitic, the Jews, and the Turanian, the yellow race, of which the Japanese are a mere branch of a subdivision.