I fought earnestly against posing before my class.  I tried to be natural and honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard.  What would you say to a soft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair, which knells suddenly:  “Do you trust white people?” You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God.

I taught history and economics and something called “sociology” at Atlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professors occupied settees and not mere chairs.  I was fortunate with this teaching in having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem of which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve.  There was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming purely theoretical.  Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all.  What did we study?  I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case, such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demanding understanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy.

* * * * *

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet,—­as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers.  The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.  The other city is dusty and hot beyond all dream,—­a feverish Pittsburg in the Mississippi Valley—­a great, ruthless, terrible thing!  It is the sort that crushes man and invokes some living superman,—­a giant of things done, a clang of awful accomplishment.

Three men came wandering across this place.  They were neither kings nor wise men, but they came with every significance—­perhaps even greater—­than that which the kings bore in the days of old.  There was one who came from the North,—­brawny and riotous with energy, a man of concentrated power, who held all the thunderbolts of modern capital in his great fists and made flour and meat, iron and steel, cunning chemicals, wood, paint and paper, transforming to endless tools a disemboweled earth.  He was one who saw nothing, knew nothing, sought nothing but the making and buying of that which sells; who out from the magic of his hand rolled over miles of iron road, ton upon ton of food and metal and wood, of coal and oil and lumber, until the thronging of knotted ways in East and real St. Louis was like the red, festering ganglia of some mighty heart.

Then from the East and called by the crash of thunderbolts and forked-flame came the Unwise Man,—­unwise by the theft of endless ages, but as human as anything God ever made.  He was the slave for the miracle maker.  It was he that the thunderbolts struck and electrified into gasping energy.  The rasp of his hard breathing shook the midnights of all this endless valley and the pulse of his powerful arms set the great nation to trembling.