“The South knows as President Harding ought to know that you can’t draw a sharp line between politics and social life. The offices of a State are in most parts of America positions of social leadership. With complete political equality the State of Mississippi might easily elect a Negro as governor. Would such a result be accepted by Mississippi as devoid of social significance? The race problem unfortunately is not one that admits of easy general solutions.”[374]
The President’s speech appeared about the time at which Dr. DuBois returned from the second of the Pan-African congresses in Europe, which he had been mainly instrumental in convening and at which there were Negroes and mulattoes from West and South Africa, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, Nigeria and the Gold Coast; Indians from India and East Africa; colored men from London; and twenty-five American Negroes. There were meetings at London, Brussels and Paris.
The London congress over which presided a distinguished English administrator, later Secretary of State for India, Sir Sidney Olivier, was mild, the chairman making no attempt to control the findings. But at Brussels, where—
“the black Senegalese, Blaise Diagne, French Deputy and High Commissioner of African troops—”[375]
presided—
DuBois says—
“We sensed the fear about us in a war land with nerves still taut.”[376]
It seems Oswald Garrison Villard, with that refreshing conceit which tempts him to discuss any subject whether he knows anything about it or not, had been ignorantly denouncing conscription, imposed on French Negroes.
With infinitely superior political acumen the London congress under the leadership of DuBois, or certainly with his approval, claimed the right to bear it equally with white Frenchmen, as long as France recognized racial equality; but when DuBois at Brussels, after a few days of harmless palaver—
“rose the last afternoon and read in French and English the resolutions of London—”[377]