And yet the mothers and fathers and the men and women of my race must often pause and ask:  Is it worth while?  Ought children be born to us?  Have we any right to make human souls face what we face today?  The answer is clear:  If the great battle of human right against poverty, against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won, not in our day, but in the day of our children’s children.  Ours is the blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory.  If, then, they are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves.  It is our duty, then, to accomplish the immortality of black blood, in order that the day may come in this dark world when poverty shall be abolished, privilege be based on individual desert, and the color of a man’s skin be no bar to the outlook of his soul.

If it is our duty as honest colored men and women, battling for a great principle, to bring not aimless rafts of children to the world, but as many as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to largest manhood, what in its inner essence shall that training be, particularly in its beginning?

The first temptation is to shield the child,—­to hedge it about that it may not know and will not dream of the color line.  Then when we can no longer wholly shield, to indulge and pamper and coddle, as though in this dumb way to compensate.  From this attitude comes the multitude of our spoiled, wayward, disappointed children.  And must we not blame ourselves?  For while the motive was pure and the outer menace undoubted, is shielding and indulgence the way to meet it?

Some Negro parents, realizing this, leave their children to sink or swim in this sea of race prejudice.  They neither shield nor explain, but thrust them forth grimly into school or street and let them learn as they may from brutal fact.  Out of this may come strength, poise, self-dependence, and out of it, too, may come bewilderment, cringing deception, and self-distrust.  It is, all said, a brutal, unfair method, and in its way it is as bad as shielding and indulgence.  Why not, rather, face the facts and tell the truth?  Your child is wiser than you think.

The truth lies ever between extremes.  It is wrong to introduce the child to race consciousness prematurely; it is dangerous to let that consciousness grow spontaneously without intelligent guidance.  With every step of dawning intelligence, explanation—­frank, free, guiding explanation—­must come.  The day will dawn when mother must explain gently but clearly why the little girls next door do not want to play with “niggers”; what the real cause is of the teacher’s unsympathetic attitude; and how people may ride in the backs of street cars and the smoker end of trains and still be people, honest high-minded souls.

Remember, too, that in such frank explanation you are speaking in nine cases out of ten to a good deal clearer understanding than you think and that the child-mind has what your tired soul may have lost faith in,—­the Power and the Glory.