“Kenneth, did you really believe that you could come back here to Central City and keep entirely away from the race problem?”
“I don’t know that I thought it out as carefully as that, but I hoped to do something like that,” was his uneasy reply. He had the feeling that she didn’t altogether approve of him. Her next words proved that she didn’t.
“Well, you can’t do it. Just because your father got along all right is no reason why you should do the same things he did. You are living in a time that is as different from his as his was from his great-grandfather’s.”
“But⸺” he attempted to defend himself.
“Wait a minute until I’ve had my say,” she checked him. “Only a few years ago they said that as soon as Negroes got property and made themselves good citizens the race problem would be solved. They said that only bad Negroes were ever lynched and they alone caused all the trouble. But you just think back over the list of coloured people right here in Central City who’ve had the most trouble during the past two years. What do you find? That it is the Negro who has acquired more property than the average white man, they are always picking on. Poor whites resent seeing a Negro more prosperous than they, and they satisfy their resentment by making it hard on that Negro. Am I right—or am I wrong?”
“I suppose there is something in what you say—but what’s the answer? You’re damned if you do—and you’re damned if you don’t!”
“I don’t know what the answer is—if I did, I’d certainly try to put it into use, instead of sitting around and trying to dodge trouble. If one of your patients had a cancer, you wouldn’t advise him to use Christian Science in treating it, would you?”
Without pausing for a reply, she went on, her words pouring out in a flood that made Kenneth feel as he did as a boy when spanked by his mother. “No, you wouldn’t! You’d operate! And that’s just what the coloured people and the white people of the South have got to do. That is, those who’ve got any sense and backbone. If they don’t, then this thing they call the race problem is going to grow so big it’s going to consume the South and America. It’s almost that big now.”
She paused for breath. Kenneth started to speak but she checked him with her hand.
“I’m not through yet! I’ve been thinking over this thing for a long time, just as every other Negro has done who’s got brains enough to do any thinking at all. I am sick and tired of hearing all this prating about the ‘superior race.’ Superior—humph! Kenneth, what you and all the rest of Negroes need is to learn that you belong to a race that was centuries old when the first white man came into the world. You’ve got to learn that a large part of this thing they call ‘white civilization’ was made by black hands, as well as by yellow and brown and red hands, too, besides what white hands have created. You’ve got to learn that the Negro to-day is contributing as much of the work that makes this civilization possible as the white race, if not more. Be proud of your race and quit whining and cringing! You’ll never get anywhere until you do! There, I’ve wanted to get that out of my system for a long time ever since we talked together last Christmas. Now it’s out and I’m through!”