At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the order came to cease firing. The 92nd Division of Negro troops stood at Thann and before Metz, in advance of the progress of troops of all America. The ground which they trod had not been occupied by other than German troops in 40 years. It was the field of honor, and recognition and equality, and must be theirs of necessity. Nature had ruthlessly perfected this type of black native-born American for the high duties of a soldier. The war was over. Allies and Americans said to him:
"As brothers we moved together—as brothers—to the dawn that advanced—to the stars that fled—rendering thanks to God in the highest, that He, having hid His face through one long night behind thick clouds of war, once again will ascend above us in the vision of perpetual peace."
The Negro felt that, as the ancient Romans were too faithful to the ideal of grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a generation or two, before the grandeur of Hannibal, so he will not ever be the mere son of a peri.
The Negro knew that he could do one thing as well as the best of men—a greater thing than Milton or Marlowe or Charlemagne ever did—he could die grandly the death. Face forward on the flats of Flanders, in Picardy and Lorraine he died grandly, to make the world safe for democracy. For we of America must remember, in all our getting on and up in the world, that, as a psychological weapon, the bristling bayonet was incomplete until a stalwart, desperate black Negro American citizen got behind it to fight, not for his gain, but for the uplift of the masses of humanity.
The war was over. It was still a small voice within that told the Negro hosts: "As this hath been no white man's war, neither shall it be a white man's peace."
THE AFTERMATH.
But yesterday the nation tried to think of the Negro as a southern problem, the solution of which belonged to statesmanship of the South. Often we have endeavored to think of him as a national problem, and have tried to persuade the national government to take in hand matters of widespread national interest wherein he was involved. But now we must of necessity think of the Negro as an international problem, ramifications of which are bound up in the roots of aspiration and kindred feeling and powerful potentiality of Frenchman and Britisher, of Asiatic and Slav, and of the great bodies of darker peoples of all the world.
As the Negro becomes an international problem, no single section of a country can be entrusted with the administration of matters pertaining to him. Such administration may be assigned by international conclave to a particular country as its national problem, but the proper channels of administration of international policy will be up from sectional caucus, through national agency to the international parliament, and down from such parliament or league, through national agencies to the section involved. And, furthermore, sectional caucus, unless it would fail in policies of its advocacy, and suffer modification by the Congress or parliament of its central governmental administration, must henceforth regard the Negro not as an aggregate all in a mass, but as a synthesis, composed of gradations from lowest to superior. This is the new concept which the war of 1918 has forced upon America, in spite of the bias of 1914.
Civilization left the parting of the ways when Woodrow Wilson's rallying cry for world democratization led America into the war. It decided to seek the path of Peace not along the lines of permitted autocracy, but of firmly and thoroughly well administered democracy. In administering democratic government, Negro regiments, graded from private to superior officer, came first as an academic proposition, and, finally, as an actuality. They came four hundred thousand strong. No group of that number can longer be considered as a mere accumulation of black men. One hundred thousand Negroes of the 92nd Division and regiments of guard have been commanded on the field of action by black headmen, with white headlight. They have taken their objectives with speed and control and the management of both of these elements of transfused morale has been in the hands of colored college men or their military equals.
The hour of decision to make the world safe for democracy was the crisis of civilization. Victory on the fields of France has been the satisfactory denouement. The question naturally arises: Shall there be a happy ending of the great drama for the white American and a tragic ending for the Negro? Or, rather, as the American brotherhood gathers about the charmed circle and smokes the pipe of peace, shall the Negro report: "I see and am satisfied?"