THE REAL ISSUE

When the fourteenth amendment is attacked in New Orleans upon the ground that a "person of African blood and descent . . . is inherently incapable of becoming a citizen of the United States", it is not to be supposed that come digger-up of dead issues is engineering a senseless assault upon impregnable principles. The fourteenth amendment gave the negro political equality with the white man, but far from settling the race problem, it simply ended one stage of its development and inaugurated another.

In the sixty years since that time the elements that comprize the new stage have been slowly crystalizing. So long as the negro remained in the South, traditional submission to the status quo delayed any acute outcropping of racial ill feeling. But the World War uprooted the negro's traditional attitude toward his lot, and the exodus to the North began. Coming in even greater numbers to new homes in a new clime, the negro finds his absolute position better than before, but his relative position worse. The ties that held him in the South are cut asunder. His inferiority complex is cast off. Now for the first time he realizes that he is a man. In outward shows the North accords him that equality he seeks; but with curdled disappointment he discovers in it

". . . the beauteous scart Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest."

Social inferiority was the spark which set off the dormant genius of Rousseau; social inferiority, acting in like manner, is fanning the slumbering fires of racial expression in the negro. The Southern negro is touched off by his more aggressive Northern brother, and a total "risorgimento" of the race ensues.

In the American Mercury for October, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph.D. (Harvard), one of the leaders of the "new negro" movement, points out the dangers of the tendency now rapidly developing among negro educational institutions to remove them entirely from white control. "America may never know, in the pother of race hate," says this leader of his people, "how much she owes to the fact that up to the present no liberally trained negro has walked into the world who had not in his youth held the hand of a white teacher and friend." This article is a sign of the times, and the New Orleans incident nothing other than a reaction against the negro renaissance.

Such events, like tongues of flame bursting from smoldering embers, have more than once shown the covert development taking place. So far this deeper significance has been ignored. It may be that the future will be more fruitful of solution by the adoption of a policy of dispassionate recognition.