To this dark-skinned American are attributed all elements of beauty and racial grandeur. Forever in survival of the world's most fit, he goes on, blending readily with civilization's high ideal, philosophically tolerating abuse offered by the less refined, effecting a racial consciousness of purity in inter-social relationships, adapting himself with symmetry and poise to the tasks of the world, and bowing in humble respect before the higher laws whose harmonies order and rectify all creation.
What will the black Rip Van Winkle behold as he walks through the corridors of the American Department of State twenty years hence? Will he behold a great black mass still at the veriest bottom of our governmental organization, or will he be caused to marvel at the synthetic gradations of black American from lowest to superior? As he views progress in all departments of the government, will he see this real American organized synthetically in all branches of the service, or will he behold him still employed as the boy or the mere high private? Time and the great heart of America will tell.
The center of gravity of world interest of 1914 has shifted and come to rest at a spot most significant for darker peoples. Victory to all participants in its glorious achievement must be less disastrous than defeat. In order to satisfy the liberal opinion of the world, some form of autonomy must be devised for the newly organized man in America. Durable peace requires that American prejudice be utterly and forever stamped out; first by the reconstructed organization of the American Expeditionary Force, which beheld its organizations of every race and creed under fire and in action; second, by the American people of every locality, who have had forced upon them by world war the new concept of a branch of the species once considered inferior; and, third, by the powers of the world, who must prevent the upgrowths in America from offering malignant germs of unrest to their own systems of national government.
After the Negro has proved his value and worth in all of these trying ways, when after this he asks for a full measure of equal rights, what American will have the heart or the hardihood to say him nay?
THE NEGRO IN THE NAVY.
Achievements of the Negro in the American Navy—Guarding the Trans-Atlantic Route to France—Battling the Submarine Peril—The Best Sailors in Any Navy in the World—Making a Navy in Three Months from Negro Stevedores and Laborers—Wonderful Accomplishments of Our Negro Yeomen and Yeowomen.
Stranger than fiction, the story of the organization, development and expansion of the United States navy from a mere atom, as it were, to the present time, when her electrically propelled men-of-war, equipped with the most luxurious compartments and modern mechanism for despatch and communication as well as her great merchant marine, floating the emblem of freedom and democracy in every civilized port of the world, is one of the most fascinating pages in the history of human achievement.
And, as it were, the very culmination of wonder and admiration, the chain of events reciting the deeds of valor and unselfish devotion to duty upon the part of her black sons, constitutes an illustrious record easily marking its participants as conspicuous representatives of a people, who have won their tardily conceded recognition in every phase of American public life.
The services of the Negro in the American navy very properly begin with the stirring and thrilling events of the American Revolution, which terminated in the independence of the colonies and the establishment of the United States.