From such heights of holiness men turn to master the world.  All the pettiness of life drops away and it becomes a great battle before the Lord.  His trumpet,—­where does it sound and whither?  I go.  I saw Montego Bay at the beginning of the World War.  The cry for service as high as heaven, as wide as human feeling, seemed filling the earth.  What were petty slights, silly insults, paltry problems, beside this call to do and dare and die?  We black folk offered our services to fight.  What happened?  Most Americans have forgotten the extraordinary series of events which worked the feelings of black America to fever heat.

First was the refusal to accept Negro volunteers for the army, except in the four black regiments already established.  While the nation was combing the country for volunteers for the regular army, it would not let the American Negro furnish even his proportionate quota of regular soldiers.  This led to some grim bantering among Negroes: 

“Why do you want to volunteer?” asked many.  “Why should you fight for this country?”

Before we had chance to reply to this, there came the army draft bill and the proposal by Vardaman and his ilk to except Negroes.  We protested to Washington in various ways, and while we were insisting that colored men should be drafted just as other citizens, the bill went through with two little “jokers.”

First, it provided that Negroes should be drafted, but trained in “separate” units; and, secondly, it somewhat ambiguously permitted men to be drafted for “labor.”

A wave of fear and unrest spread among Negroes and while we were looking at both these provisions askance, suddenly we received the draft registration blank.  It directed persons “of African descent” to “tear off the corner!” Probably never before in the history of the United States has a portion of the citizens been so openly and crassly discriminated against by action of the general government.  It was disheartening, and on top of it came the celebrated “German plots.”  It was alleged in various parts of the country with singular unanimity that Germans were working among the Negroes, and it was further intimated that this would make the Negroes too dangerous an element to trust with guns.  To us, of course, it looked as though the discovery and the proposition came from the same thinly-veiled sources.

Considering carefully this series of happenings the American Negro sensed an approaching crisis and faced a puzzling dilemma.  Here was evidently preparing fertile ground for the spread of disloyalty and resentment among the black masses, as they were forced to choose apparently between forced labor or a “Jim-Crow” draft.  Manifestly when a minority group is thus segregated and forced out of the nation, they can in reason do but one thing—­take advantage of the disadvantage.  In this case we demanded colored officers for the colored troops.