I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia.  I labored morning, noon, and night.  Nobody ever reads that fat volume on “The Philadelphia Negro,” but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me.  The colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms.  They had a natural dislike to being studied like a strange species.  I met again and in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner social whirlings of my own people.  They set me to groping.  I concluded that I did not know so much as I might about my own people, and when President Bumstead invited me to Atlanta University the next year to teach sociology and study the American Negro, I accepted gladly, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars.

My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday.  They were years of great spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work and hard play.  Here I found myself.  I lost most of my mannerisms.  I grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and studied human beings.  I became widely-acquainted with the real condition of my people.  I realized the terrific odds which faced them.  At Wilberforce I was their captious critic.  In Philadelphia I was their cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe.  It took but a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense.  I saw the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it before,—­naked and unashamed!  The faint discrimination of my hopes and intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster of cruel oppression.  I held back with more difficulty each day my mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.

With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character.  The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me.  I saw life through all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment.  I emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but hugging to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto stubbornness, to fight the good fight.

At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision.  My life’s last and greatest door stood ajar.  What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight?  Despite all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, I found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting against another and greater wing.

Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the personal plane.  Heaven knows I tried.  That first meeting of a knot of enthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion.  At the second meeting, at Harper’s Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of a holy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world it seemed merely the envy of fools against a great man, Booker Washington.