XL

“DARKWATER”

We have so many, many problems in America.  Books are constantly being written offering solutions for them, but still they persist.

There are volumes on auction bridge, family budgets and mind-training.  A great many people have ideas on what should be done to relieve the country of certain undesirable persons who have displayed a lack of sympathy with American institutions. (As if American institutions needed sympathy!) And some of the more generous-minded among us are writing books showing our duty to the struggling young nationalities of Europe.  It is bewildering to be confronted by all these problems, each demanding intelligent solution.

Little wonder, then, that we have no time for writing books on the one problem which is exclusively our own.  With so many wrongs in the world to be righted, who can blame us for overlooking the one tragic wrong which lies at our door?  With so many heathen to whom the word of God must be brought and so many wild revolutionists in whom must be instilled a respect for law and order, is it strange that we should ourselves sometimes lump the word of God and the principles of law and order together under the head of “sentimentality” and shrug our shoulders?  Justice in the abstract is our aim—­any American will tell you that—­so why haggle over details and insist on justice for the negro?

But W.E.B.  Du Bois does insist on justice for the negro, and in his book “Darkwater” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.) his voice rings out in a bitter warning through the complacent quiet which usually reigns around this problem of America.  Mr. Du Bois seems to forget that we have the affairs of a great many people to attend to and persists in calling our attention to this affair of our own.  And what is worse, in the minds of all well-bred persons he does not do it at all politely.  He seems to be quite distressed about something.

Maybe it is because he finds himself, a man of superior mind and of sensitive spirit who is a graduate of Harvard, a professor and a sincere worker for the betterment of mankind, relegated to an inferior order by many men and women who are obviously his inferiors, simply because he happens to differ from them in the color of his skin.  Maybe it is because he sees the people of his own race who have not had his advantages (if a negro may ever be said to have received an advantage) being crowded into an ignominious spiritual serfdom equally as bad as the physical serfdom from which they were so recently freed.  Maybe it is because of these things that Mr. Du Bois seems overwrought.

Or perhaps it is because he reads each day of how jealous we are, as a Nation, of the sanctity of our Constitution, how we revere it and draw a flashing sword against its detractors, and then sees this very Constitution being flouted as a matter of course in those districts where the amendment giving the negroes a right to vote is popularly considered one of the five funniest jokes in the world.