I am aware of the fact that in what I have said in regard to the hardships of the negro in this country I throw myself open to the criticism of doing what I have all my life condemned and everywhere sought to avoid; namely, laying over-emphasis on matters in which the negro race in America has been badly treated, and thereby overlooking those matters in which the negro has been better treated in America than anywhere else in the world.
Despite all any one has said or can say in regard to the injustice and unfair treatment of the people of my race at the hands of the white men in this country, I venture to say that there is no example in history of the people of one race who have had the assistance, the direction, and the sympathy of another race in all its efforts to rise to such an extent as the negro in the United States.
Notwithstanding all the defects in our system of dealing with him, the negro in this country owns more property, lives in better houses, is in a larger measure encouraged in business, wears better clothes, eats better food, has more school-houses and churches, more teachers and ministers, than any similar group of negroes anywhere else in the world.
What has been accomplished in the past years, however, is merely an indication of what can be done in the future.
As white and black learn day by day to adjust, in a spirit of justice and fair play, those interests which are individual and racial, and to see and feel the importance of those fundamental interests which are common, so will both races grow and prosper. In the long run no individual and no race can succeed which sets itself at war against the common good.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
BY JAMES D. CORROTHERS
HE came, a dark youth, singing in the dawn
Of a new freedom, glowing o’er his lyre,
Refining, as with great Apollo’s fire,