In other words, shall the 92nd Division of Negro fighters and the greater hosts of black war workers overseas, return to America with honor in theory, but not pursued in fact to its logical finality? Shall these black bulwarks of the business of world war find the door of the business world of peace slammed in their faces? Shall these black survivors of terrific struggle for world democracy return home only to be declared unfit to vote an American ballot? Shall the black soldier hero be allowed to take his croix de guerre into a jim-crow car? Shall the black Red Cross nurse, rushing to the aid of benighted humanity regardless of color, be refused accommodation at places of public proprietorship whither she may seek rest or refreshment? Tragedy begets tragedy. Seventeen seventy-six begot 1861, and 1861 begot 1914.
The times demand decisive action. Sociological error, committed today, will cause malformation of an important member of the American body politic. It will cause the ship of state to ride an uneven keel. This ship of state must be brought to her ancient moorings, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address of Lincoln, and the Farewell of Old John Brown on the scaffold.
The tumult has died. Revelry and shouting fill every program. Is the Negro to return unheralded to homeland, and with his eyes to the hills, undergo patting and pitying and be given a place in the corner? Or are the colored boys in khaki to announce their return by a vigorous knocking at the gate? Shall they have cause to cry to America: "A house divided against itself cannot stand!" And shall they knock and knock and knock until America sets herself to wonder what has this army Negro to do that he becomes so unceremonious? Or shall they find the gate wide open and triumphal arches erected in every section of the country in their honor to signify that defeat of German autocracy means democratization of every section of the entire world? An international conscience demands for the Negro hero a happy ending of it all.
The Negro looks to the military agencies of America to produce a genuine peace wherein he may live happy ever after. Regarded in America as the most alien of aliens before the war, he demands recognition today as the most loyal of loyalists. But yesterday Anglo-Saxon prejudice persisted in viewing him as a physical alien, a mental alien, a moral alien and a social alien. The Negro is willing to discuss no further this prejudicial conception of himself forced home by libelous propaganda and by governmental administration for hundreds of years, if the agencies of reconstruction will perfect and put in operation a vigorous Americanization policy in his behalf.
Military life has taught the Negro the advantage derived from the use of pure food and balanced ration. It has taken him from the ghetto into the pure air of the open country, and filled his lungs with deep draughts of the free breezes of France. It has removed him from the temptation to imbibe the beverage that destroys human faculties and has accustomed him in a measure to the beneficial use of purified water. It has undertaken through carefully selected work, exercise and recreation to perfect the habits of digestion, assimilation and elimination. The result has been indeed marvelous. No America Negro who went to fight for humanity will return to America as the same physical being. No American will dare stand before the returned Negro trooper and say: "Behold a sub-species of mankind, wooly of hair, long of head, with dilated nostrils, thick lips, thicker cranium, flat foot, prehensile great toe and larkheel. Yea, behold him, dark of skin, whose mentality is like unto a child, and closely related to the anthropoid ape; whose weight of brain is only comparable to that of the gorilla." Where is the American who will dare stand before any Negro trooper returned from France and thus mock and deride him? Military agency has completely destroyed the physical concept which the white world had of the Negro in 1914, by placing him in the focus of Caucasian binocular vision, wherein his better attributes become visible in their synthetic relation.
In addition, military life has sharpened the mental powers of the Negro in command to meet the highest exactions of modern warfare. Colonel Charles Denton Young, Negro graduate of West Point, if we may trust the record, is capable of the same high character of mental processes as John J. Pershing. Military test has proven before the world that the Negro is no mental alien, but heir to all the ages of Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Greek and Egyptian culture.
In France the American Negro has produced no notorious offenders against civil or military usage. He has arisen to the moral concept of high responsibility for the future of his race in the estimation of all mankind. There is no story of moral degeneracy which has yet come from abroad concerning him. Pitfall, temptation and opportunity for vice and crime have all been shunned in light of preparation for the higher service. The Negro has proven his power of moral restraint while guided by leadership of his own color. As a social being he has sacrificed his life for the highest form of social existence, democracy. Who, then, is there to call him alien? Today he is no longer Negro, nor Afro-American, nor colored American, nor American of African descent, but he is American—simply this, and nothing more.
He has been raised to erect stature and made a man by the military branch of the United States Government, because of signal service to the American peoples. His prayer is that this military government long may live as such to train the great mass which he calls kin into a synthetic whole.
As he evolved from a student in a military training camp to military leadership, so he desires the great military organization of America to continue to exist, that through its agency he may attend the training camps which lead to industrial, business, political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of autocracy, but now removed.
This American has made good in public. He has demonstrated both efficiency and initiative. He has compelled popular belief to conceive him as a man. The Caucasian world he has caused to perceive that he might function as a valuable and serviceable element of twentieth century civilization. Will the Anglo-Saxon issue to him the warrant of immunities and privileges certifying that he is four-square with the dominant opinion of mankind, and, therefore, entitled to superior status?