Of the movement I was willy-nilly leader.  I hated the role.  For the first time I faced criticism and cared.  Every ideal and habit of my life was cruelly misjudged.  I who had always overstriven to give credit for good work, who had never consciously stooped to envy was accused by honest colored people of every sort of small and petty jealousy, while white people said I was ashamed of my race and wanted to be white!  And this of me, whose one life fanaticism had been belief in my Negro blood!

Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the Springfield Republican and written for Mr. Fortune’s Globe.  I dreamed of being an editor myself some day.  I am an editor.  In the great, slashing days of college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the battles of the Negro race.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is such a body, and it grows daily.  In the dark days at Wilberforce I planned a time when I could speak freely to my people and of them, interpreting between two worlds.  I am speaking now.  In the study at Atlanta I grew to fear lest my radical beliefs should so hurt the college that either my silence or the institution’s ruin would result.  Powers and principalities have not yet curbed my tongue and Atlanta still lives.

It all came—­this new Age of Miracles—­because a few persons in 1909 determined to celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday properly by calling for the final emancipation of the American Negro.  I came at their call.  My salary even for a year was not assured, but it was the “Voice without reply.”  The result has been the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and The Crisis and this book, which I am finishing on my Fiftieth Birthday.

Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not unkind.  But it was not my time.  Yet in nature some time soon and in the fullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turned South and eastward; and, dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure, enjoy death as I have enjoyed life.

A Litany at Atlanta

O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our ears an-hungered in these fearful days—­

Hear us, good Lord!

Listen to us, Thy children:  our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary.  With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God, crying: 

We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!

We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men.  When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed,—­curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.

Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!

And yet, whose is the deeper guilt?  Who made these devils?  Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice?  Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers?  Who bought and sold their crime and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?